Cardano Technical Architect: “We Have Many New Technical Development In The Pipeline”

Input-Output Global’s (IOG) Principal Technical Architect for Cardano Duncan Coutts shared his views on the state of the blockchain and its upcoming upgrades. In an interview with CityAM, Coutts highlighted the innovations happening on the network and what the upcoming Vasil Hard Fork has in store.

The Cardano blockchain has undergone numerous improvements over the past few years. In the second half of 2020, the blockchain fully migrated to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus protocol and then proceeded to implement smart contracts capabilities.

Fully achieved with the Hard Fork Combinator event “Alonzo”, IOG has been laser-focused on improving the network’s performance and its scalability. In that sense, Coutts said:

There are a lot of things that I’m excited about in the coming months for Cardano. We have many new technical developments in the pipeline. Some of them are happening sooner than others, but all of them will have big impacts on our community.

One of these upcoming improvements is the Input Endorsers. These tools will enable the blockchain to increase its “block propagation times” to process more transactions with an upcoming feature called pre-constructed blocks.

The latter will be a tool that will be implemented to harvest the full potential of the Cardano blockchain, according to IOG’s Technical Architect. As the network introduces these features, the ecosystem will benefit from higher transaction rates with low fees.

In addition, the Input Endorsers and the “pre-constructed blocks” are part of an upcoming improvement on Cardano’s consensus protocol, Ouroboros. The company is working on a new version for this algorithm called Ouroboros Leios which will innovate the block production mechanism:

(…) we’ll be producing ranking blocks that have 10-20 smaller block bodies. These are the pre-constructed blocks, which will be spread out overtime with input endorsers, allowing the resources to be used more fully, the spread of blocks to happen faster, and for transaction rates to be higher (…).

Network Upgrade, More Decentralization, Cardano’s Vasil Hard Fork Creates Hype

Cardano has been progressively becoming more decentralized and the community has been gaining more control over block production. IOG uses a series metric to measure decentralization on the network (block production, what percentage of the network’s nodes are run by the community) called “d” parameter.

This metric will be completely removed with the introduction of the upcoming Vasil Hard Fork. In other words, the blockchain will be completely decentralized.

Vasil will also introduce network improvements and will facilitate the migration of ERC-20 tokens into this blockchain. Coutts concluded the following on why the upcoming Vasil Hard Fork will mark yet another major milestone for this blockchain:

A key scalability-focused element of Vasil will be the introduction of ‘diffusion pipelining’. This will allow for continued network tuning and optimization, including an increase in block size, ensuring we’re scaling Cardano as much as possible.

At the time of writing, ADA’s price trades at $0.45 with a 2% profit in the last 24 hours.