Cardano Founder Reveals Next Big Upgrade for ADA

Upcoming upgrade would allow developers to port smart contracts from Ethereum and create sidechain bridges

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson revealed the next big upgrade coming to the Cardano network in a recent tweet.

Hoskinson highlights Plutus V3, a massive upgrade coming alongside the Chang hard fork, as one that brings so much to the table for Cardano dApps and blockchain interoperability.

Plutus Core is a scripting language used on the Cardano blockchain. September 2022's Vasil upgrade brought about the current version of Plutus Core, Plutus V2.

According to an official Input Output Global (IOG) blog article, the Plutus V3 upgrade will improve Plutus Core's cryptographic capabilities, allowing Cardano to meet the most recent industry standards. It should be recalled that the Valentine upgrade from a year ago added support for SECP elliptic curves (ECDSA and Schnorr).

The addition of new cryptographic primitives to V3 will assist developers in meeting industry best practices, porting smart contracts from Ethereum and creating sidechain bridges.

Aside from cryptographic primitives, Plutus V3 is planned to improve performance by adding a "sums of products" (SOPs) feature to enable direct encoding of various data types. In addition, V3 would provide an updated script context that allows users to view CIP-1694 governance-related entities.

Plutus V3 would also add advanced Plutus primitives, which provide more tools for developers and expand the possibilities for writing smart contracts.

Overall, Plutus V3 is expected to improve the developer experience by increasing smart contract adoption, bringing support for governance and voting features and promoting blockchain interoperability.

Plutus V3, which was released with Cardano node v.8.8.0-pre, is now available on SanchoNet, introducing the Cardano community to CIP-1694 governance features in a controlled testnet environment.

About the author 
Tomiwabold Olajide Tomiwabold is a cryptocurrency analyst and an experienced technical analyst. He pays close attention to cryptocurrency research, conducting comprehensive price analysis and exchanging predictions of estimated market trends. Tomiwabold earned his degree at the University of Lagos.