After several months of delay, Vasil Cardano’s upgrade and hard fork finally went live starting Thursday at 21:44 UTC, bringing “significant performance and capacity” improvements to the blockchain.
Blockchain company Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) announced the success of the Cardano mainnet hard fork on Twitter on Thursday. Although there are others too observed the hard fork in the live Twitter space by Cardano co-founder Charles Hoskinson.
#Vasil Successful HFC mainnet event!
We are pleased to announce that the IOG team, today at 21:44:00 UTC, in collaboration with the @CardanoStiftungthe Cardano mainnet was hard to execute through the HFC event, hence the new deployment #Vasil features for the chain.
1/5— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) September 22, 2022
The #Vasil mainnet HFC event was a great success! We are pleased to announce that, today at 21:44:00 UTC, the IOG team, together with the @CardanoStiftung, successfully executed the Cardano mainnet through the HFC event, rolling out new #Vasil features on the blockchain. 1/5- Input Output (@InputOutputHK) September 22, 2022
IOHK previously said that the significant upgrade brought by the fork is the transmission of blocks without full validation, which allows for faster block creation. Upgrades to its Plutus smart contracts for increased efficiency also allow decentralized applications to deploy and operate more cheaply.
Better to buy mouthwash. Vasil is live Anyone have suggestions for Greg 🙂 https://t.co/RTehxad97Z
—Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) September 22, 2022
Better to buy mouthwash. Vasil is live Anyone have suggestions for Greg 🙂 https://t.co/RTehxad97Z
— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) September 22, 2022
The new capabilities brought by the Plutus Script updates will be available to developers on the mainnet on September 27th, after a period that currently lasts about five days.
Bill Barrhydt, founder of cryptocurrency exchange Abra, called the upgrade “a big win for developers.” Genius Yield is a decentralized financial platform tweeted that it was “one of the most complex and consequential updates ever to the Cardano network.”
Congratulations to the Cardano ($ADA) team on the Vasil hardfork. More hard work in crypto pays off.
UTXO and making inputs accessible to scripts/Plutus without throwing them is a big win for developers. Very good!
Congratulations @IOHK_Charles @CardanoStiftung and teams!
— Bill Barhydt (@billbarhydt) September 22, 2022
Kudos to the Cardano ($ADA) team for the Vasil hard fork. More hard work in crypto pays off. Making UTXOs and inputs accessible to scripts/Plutus without throwing them is a big win for developers. Good luck! Congratulations to @IOHK_Charles @CardanoStiftung and the team!
— Bill Barrhydt (@billbarhydt) September 22, 2022
IOHK announced the upgrade date in early September, and the “critical mass indicators” required to trigger the hard fork were achieved within 24 hours of the event.
Also read: Post-Merge Ethereum hard forks launched: What to do now?
The launch was originally scheduled for June, but was delayed twice due to issues on the testnet caused by bugs in an earlier version of Node that caused compatibility issues.
After Vasil’s upgrade, Cardano continues to develop its layer 2 scaling solution, the Hydra protocol, which processes transactions off the Cardano blockchain using it as a security and settlement layer.
Hydra’s latest update, dated September 16, indicates that the team has fixed a known issue with Hydra nodes. The launch date of the protocol has not been set, but is planned for the end of 2022 or the first quarter of 2023.
The announcement of the successful launch sent the price of ADA up nearly 4% in the past 24 hours to $0.46 according to CoinGecko data, although it is still down more than 4% 5% on the week.
