Cardano Mainnet Block Size to Undergo 10% Increase Later Today: Details

IOHK’s Twitter account spreads the word about a major update on Cardano mainnet that is to occur today at 8:20 p.m. UTC.

Block size to grow 10%

Developers will increase the block size by 10%—8 kilobytes. That would mean adding 8 Kb to 80 Kb of the current block size. This suggestion was made last week before the weekend kicked off.

This signifies a substantial enhancement of the Cardano network, thanks to which the throughput and performance of dApps will continue to grow higher. This upgrade comes on the wave of Cardano network improvements that have been planned for this year by developer teams.

As soon as this improvement is made, the IOHK team will monitor the performance of the Cardano network closely over at least five days (one epoch) and will see what next increment to make to it.

Overall, with the massive growth of Cardano transaction volume recently, the team plans to improve the network very carefully and steadily.

Before the weekend, an update proposal was made to increase #Cardano mainnet block size by 8K. This change will take effect later today at the boundary of epoch 335, Monday 25th April @ UTC 20:20:00. The current block size is 80KB, and after this change, it will be 88KB 🧵 1/5

— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) April 25, 2022

Cardano improvements made this year

Last month, during the Cardano MidMonth Development Update, which was live on YouTube, Cardano’s head of architecture, John Alan Woods, summarized that this year so far, the size of each block on the network has increased from 64 Kb to 80 Kb (the 11% upgrade to 80 Kb was made in early February from 72 Kb)—a 25% increase overall.

Developers have also added more memory units on the Plutus side for smart contracts—from 10 million units to 14 million. At four memory units per block, their amount has also begun to grow, rising from 50 million to 56 million. Woods stated back then that in the coming epoch they were planning to increase that amount to 62 million.

Despite being careful with the introduction of any changes, Woods stated that IOHK was implementing something new on Cardano every three weeks.