Cardano Vasil hard fork successfully launches on testnet

The highly anticipated Cardano Vasil hard fork has been successfully launched on the testnet today. Cardano is thus taking an important step towards the upgrade of the mainnet and the promising improvements that will become reality.

Developers, stake pool operators and exchanges are now being urged to try their work on the testnet to make sure everything is working as it should.

We’re happy to report that today at 20:20 UTC the IOG team has successfully hard forked the #cardano test net. This is an important next step in the journey towards the Vasil upgrade on mainnet.

1/10 pic.twitter.com/9F9vzec0pK

— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) July 3, 2022

What can we expect from Vasil?

When the mainnet has also undergone the Vasil hard fork, Cardano takes some important steps in the right direction. Vasil makes it possible to create blocks faster and increases scalability for decentralized applications, among other things. Furthermore, Input Output HK (IOHK), the organization behind Cardano, on that developers also benefit from better script performance and efficiency.

The Vasil upgrade is now live on testnet, coming to mainnet in a few weeks. Expect Cardano DeFi to go into the rapids from here

— ADA whale (@cardano_whale) July 3, 2022

The expectation and hope of the Cardano community is that the DeFi ecosystem will finally take off after the Vasil hard fork. To date, the Cardano DeFi ecosystem has a mere 11 decentralized applications. This is nowhere near the activity on Ethereum.

“Fork hard as soon as everyone is ready”

IOHK further indicates that the hard fork of the mainnet will only take place once everyone in the ecosystem is comfortable with it. However, it is expected that the network will switch to the new software in about four weeks. It is an upgrade that Cardano can certainly use at the moment, as the usage figures of the network are hugely disappointing. Last year it launched the possibility to work with smart contracts on Cardano, but so far little has happened with this.

The largest decentralized application for Cardano is currently WingRiders, a decentralized stock exchange platform. At the time of writing this is almost $50 million “locked up”. After the successful hard fork of the Sepolia testnet, it will therefore be the turn of the mainnet in about four weeks. So far, there seems to be little enthusiasm in the market about this, as the Cardano price has recorded a minus of 2.16 percent in the past 24 hours.