Cardano’s Vasil Hard Fork Delayed by Another Month

The blockchain engineering company behind the Cardano network, Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), has released ‘disappointing news’ saying that the long-awaited Vasil upgrade will be pushed back by one month.

Cardano co-founder Charles Hoskinson says the Vasil upgrade will give Cardano and its smart contract features a “massive performance boost.” It was supposed to happen on June 29, but the latest estimate is that it will happen in the last week of July.

Why this delay?

In a blog post on June 20, IOHK’s head of delivery and project Nigel Hemsley said that the core Input Output Global (IOG) team working on the upgrade is “very close to finishing the core work,”. However, there are still seven bugs that need to be fixed. He also said that none of them are “severe.”

“From many different points of view, the work on Vasil has been the most complicated development and integration program to date. “It’s a difficult process that requires a lot of work from core teams and close coordination throughout the ecosystem,” Hemsley wrote.

Because of this, the Cardano Foundation, a non-profit that oversees the development of Cardano, and the IOG team agreed to put off sending the Vasil hard fork to the Cardano testnet until June 29.

Once the testnet has been hard forked, developers of Cardano-based decentralized apps (dApps), as well as stake pool operators (SPOs), will have about four weeks “to do any required integration and testing work” before the Vasil hard fork begins on the mainnet in late July. The blog quoted:

“Today, IOG and the Cardano Foundation have agreed a new target date to hard fork the testnet at the end of June. Once completed, we will then allow four weeks for exchanges and SPOs to carry out any required integration and testing work. This is only reasonable and should not be rushed. The working assumption should therefore now be a Cardano mainnet hard fork occurring during the last week of July.“

“We know that some people will be upset by this news. “However, we are being very careful to ensure this deployment goes smoothly,” Hemsley said.

Why is Vasil hard fork important for Cardano?

The Vasil hard fork is the most important change to Cardano since the Alonzo hard fork in September, which made smart contracts finally work on the network. With this latest upgrade, there will be four changes to the network called “CIP31, CIP32, CIP33, and CIP40.”

In theory, these upgrades should make transactions smaller, which should increase the network’s throughput and lower transaction fees.

Cardano is a proof-of-stake blockchain platform that wants to compete with Ethereum as a lower-cost smart contract network. Cardano is the seventh most valuable cryptocurrency, with a market capitalization of about $16 billion. At the time of writing, Cardano was exchanging hands at $ 0.462 which is 5 % down from the time of announcement of the delay.