Here’s The Latest On The Cardano Vasil Hard Fork

Cardano’s Vasil hard fork should be coming soon. Here’s the latest on this big update to the Cardano Network.

Covered:

The State Of Cardano
What Is The Cardano Vasil Hard Fork?
Rumors Of Delay

The State Of Cardano

Cardano underwent the Goegen smart contract fork back in September of 2021. It was by far its biggest fork so far because it brought smart contract functionality to what’s intended to be a smart contract protocol.

Since then, Cardano has grown by leaps and bounds. There are Dexs There are NFTs. There is hope. It wasn’t easy. The rollout saw some big issues pop up — and made concurrency a must add to the vocabulary — but many of the issues have been smoothed out — an increase in blocksize did the trick. Cardano, for once, has satisfied users.

That said, it’s not over yet for Cardano development-wise. I mean, what would Cardano be if it wasn’t always a month away from being a month away?

What Is The Cardano Vasil Hard Fork?

Cardano’s upcoming Vasil Hard Fork is tentatively scheduled for the end of June — more on that in a sec. Named after Vasil Dabov, a Bulgarian mathematician/Cardano ambassador who recently passed, the fork will upgrade network capacity and its scripting language Plutus.

Essentially, it will address the limitations of Goguen. Yes, transaction times have gotten faster, but there are still limitations on how many smart contract-based transactions the network can handle. Thankfully, Vasil will improve on that. Meaning, that as the network continues to grow, growth won’t be stunted by the limitations of Goguen.

Another issue stemming from Goguen was the Plutus language. Developers were having trouble switching over to it from other programming languages like Solidity (Ethereum’s scripting language). One of the improvements will let developers look at the result of an output without having to spend it. This will greatly increase throughput and increase concurrency — much to the horror of Cardano’s haters.

All in all, it’s fair to say that this update is geared towards easing the Cardano experience for users and developers alike.

* For more on the update, click here.

Rumors Of Delay

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A Cardano fork may get delayed. Of course, the same joke could be made about Ethereum, which is scheduled to release Ethereum 2.0 sometime 2140. Nevertheless, it’s looking likely that Vasil may experience a delay.

“As per mid month, we’re very close now but ultimately need to assess readiness of Dapps, exchanges, SPOs etc. We’ll have an update for everyone Monday,” said Tim Harrison VP of Community and Ecosystem at Input/Output. Harrison said this on the 18th, and it’s Monday now, but still no announcement has been made. It’s expected the launch could be moved till August.

Speculation abounds over whether major issues have arisen during the testnet. Not to mention, there has been a delay in Stakepool Operators (SPOs) in switching over to the upgrade. Another issue is the continued crypto liquidity crisis. Obviously, ADA platforms are not unscathed by this. It could be a big ask for a successful switchover during a busy time for these DeFi protocols.

One Twitter, user who goes by Eenmakkie, had a particularly realistic-sounding announcement that makes you think he got a copy of the Early Edition.

1) Due to the market liquidity issues: exchanges & lending platforms have many withdrawal requests that consume all their staff times. Asking more staff resources to synchronise to a hard fork these difficult days was adding extra pressure on their staff.

— Eenmakkie 🐳 (@eenmakkie) June 20, 2022