Cardano’s Vasil Hard Fork To Finally Launch On September 22

Cardano’s Vasil hard fork could finally see the light of day as Cardano developers announced a definitive date for the launch. 

The Vasil hard fork is the protocol’s fifth major upgrade and adds significant improvements to the Plutus programming language and greater scalability with significantly lower fees. 

The Most Significant Cardano Update 

Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, described the Vasil upgrade as the “hardest update we’ve ever had to do.” The exclamation came after Cardano developers finally announced that the Vasil hard fork would take place on the 22nd of September. The hard fork comes barely a week after the anticipated date of the Ethereum Merge, which is set for the 15th of September. 

Input Output Hong Kong, which worked on the update, stated that three necessary critical mass indicators had been achieved. 

“1. 75% of mainnet blocks being created by the final Vasil node candidate (1.35.3) 2. approximately 25 exchanges upgraded (representing 80% of ADA liquidity) 3. top 10 DApps by TVL confirming they have upgraded to 1.35.3 on PreProduction and are ready for mainnet.”

It also added that most of the top cryptocurrency exchanges, such as Binance, Coinbase, Upbit, WhiteBit, BKEX, and HitBTC, are in progress to be ready for the upgrade. Out of these exchanges, Binance is nearly ready, while MEXC and Bitrue are ready for the Vasil upgrade.

Greater Scalability And Lower Fees 

Developers working on the Vasil hard fork have promised users a much higher level of scalability and significantly lower fees once the upgrade has been implemented. Vasil also significantly upgrades to Plutus, Cardano’s programming language implemented in smart contracts. Plutus was introduced with the Alonzo upgrade, which was implemented last year. 

“The upgrade will also bring enhancements to Plutus to enable devs to create more powerful and efficient blockchain-based applications.” 

Charles Hoskinson, Cardano founder, spoke about the upgrade in his YouTube vlog, stating, 

“If we’ve all done our job right, we will wake up on the 22nd of September, and it will be just another day. “We started and knew that, over time, we could get to what Ethereum has done, but we understood a road map to get there. […] There’s a lot of things on the horizon, especially in 2023.”

The Vasil hard fork is named after its late Bulgarian community member, Vasil St. Dabov. Vasil was the Chief Blockchain Advisor at software R&D firm Quanterall before he passed in December 2021. 

Significant Collaboration Required 

According to Hoskinson, the Vasil upgrade required a significant amount of workload to be undertaken by the development team, and a lot of the collaborators were overloaded. 

“It really demonstrated that we need to build better processes and, you know, better foundations to launch things at this scale and magnitude. We kind of pushed the limit a bit on Vasil. Probably the hardest update we’ve ever had to do as an ecosystem.”

The successful launch came after several delays in the launch of Vasil, as developers needed more time to iron out bugs. Eventually, the Vasil hard fork testnet, scheduled for June, was pushed to the last week of July. 

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.