Cardano Vasil hard fork pushed back to July

The blockchain engineering company Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), which created the Cardano network, has announced some “disappointing news”. It announced a month-long postponement of the eagerly anticipated Cardano Vasil hard fork.

According to IOHK’s Nigel Hemsley, the IOG team working on the upgrade is “very close to finishing the core work”. He wrote in a blog post on June 20. However, seven bugs remain open and need fixing.

Cardano Vasil hard fork requires more work

Cardano’s “massive performance improvement” and its smart contract features will come together with the Vasil upgrade. Originally, its completion should be on June 29, the most recent estimate is now for the latter week of July.

“The work on Vasil has been the most complex program of development and integration to date, from several angles,” Hemsley wrote. “It’s a challenging process that requires not only significant work from core teams but also close coordination across the ecosystem.”

As a result, the Cardano Foundation and the IOG team agreed to postpone the Vasil hard fork to the Cardano testnet until June 29.

Developers from Cardano-based decentralized apps (dApps) and stake pool operators SPOs will have approximately four weeks “to complete any necessary integration and testing work” before the Vasil hard fork occurs on the mainnet in late July, according to Coin Telegraph.

“This is only reasonable and should not be rushed,” it said. “The working assumption should therefore now be a Cardano mainnet hard fork occurring during the last week of July.”

Biggest upgrade since Alonzo

Since the September Alonzo hard fork, which enabled smart contracts on the network, the Vasil hard fork is the biggest improvement to Cardano. They will be introducing “CIP31, CIP32, CIP33, and CIP40” network improvements with this most recent upgrade.

Theoretically, these modifications should decrease transaction size, hence enhancing network throughput and decreasing network transaction fees.