After several months of delay, Vasil Cardano’s update and hard fork finally went live on Thursday at 7:44 pm, Paris time. The upgrade involves introducing several new changes to the blockchain in terms of speed and scalability and tries to tackle multiple issues at the same time.
Announced the success of the Cardano mainnet hard fork at blockchain firm Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) on Twitter on Thursday, while others also noted the hard fork in Twitter Spaces live 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
IOHK previously stated that the significant improvements brought by the fork are the transmission of blocks without full validation, which allows faster block creation. Updates to its Plutus smart contracts also allow for increased efficiency decentralized applications to deploy and operate at a lower cost.
Plutus script updates will bring new capabilities available to developers on mainnet on September 27the. According to Cardano’s Tim Harrison, after the update, the transaction speed should improve by about 20 seconds.
Huge props to everyone who worked so hard to deliver #Vasil to #Cardano. Watching a #Cardano The event of a hard fork combinator is like a glorious combination of the edge of a seat suspension and looking dry paint. Just as it should be 😀 #Cardano. pic.twitter.com/4AQeBYxQ0y
— Tim Harrison (@timbarrison) September 22, 2022
Bill Barrhydt, the founder of cryptocurrency exchange Abra, called the upgrade a “big win for developers” with decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Genius Yield, tweeting that it was over “one of the most complex and consequential Cardano network updates ever.” Cardano co-founder Charles Hoskinson described it as the most difficult update the developers have made since the project launched in 2017.
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
IOHK announced the date for the upgrade in early September, and the “critical mass indicators” required to trigger the hard fork were achieved within 24 hours of the event. The launch day was originally planned for June, but it was delayed twice due to problems on the testnet due to bugs in an earlier version of node that cause compatibility issues.
After Vasily update of charge. Cardano continues to develop its Tier 2 scaling solution, the Hydra head protocol, which processes transactions off the Cardano blockchain using it as a security and settlement layer. The latest Hydra update, dated September 16, details the resolution of a known issue with Hydra nodes. A launch date for the protocol has not been set, however it is scheduled for the end of 2022 or the first quarter of 2023.
A hard fork occurs when network code fundamentally changes and requires the creation of a new, separate version of blockchain. They can be, but are not always, controversial. For example, a hard fork occurred on the Ethereum network after last week’s Merger. This was an attempt to preserve a proof-of-work version of Ethereum.
This is an important development for Defi Cardano projects like Indigo Protocol, which has been running its synthetic assets project on the Vasil testnet since July. Indigo allows users to trade synthetic versions of assets, such as TSLA stock, without being actually own it. Instead, users can buy and trade iTSLA, which is backed by TSLA shares, through Indigo.
“Cardano fees incurred by Indigo users have been significantly reduced by reducing the number of scripts required to read data from the blockchain,” the company wrote in a blog post.
News of the successful launch sent the price of Cardano (ADA) nearly 4% higher on Thursday afternoon, but gains have since pared, with Cardano posting a modest 1.3% rise on Friday morning to $0.458. according to data from CoinMarketCap.
