Cardano’s Vasil Upgrade Deployed After Months of Delays
- The long awaited Vasil upgrade had finally been activated, enabling increased network capacity, higher throughput, and lower transaction costs on Cardano.
- The upgrade gas also made significant improvements to the Plutus smart contract language, though its full capabilities will be unlocked on 27 September.
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After two delays, the Cardano blockchain has finally deployed its Vasil upgrade and hard fork, significantly improving the performance and capability of the network, blockchain firm Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) said via Twitter on 23 September.
According to the announcement, the Vasil upgrade was triggered on Thursday at 9:44 pm UTC and successfully hard forked the Cardano mainnet, which now has better programmability and throughput potential. The upgrade us part of the Basho era, one of the key development phases of Cardano that focuses on optimization, scalability, and interoperability.
One of the significant improvements Vasil has made to the network is using block transmission without full validation to allow for faster block creation. The upgrade also made changes to Cardano’s Plutus smart contract language, making it more efficient, which will allow decentralized finance (DeFi) project to create more powerful and cost-effective applications. The full capabilities of Plutus v2, however, will be made available for developers on 27 September.
The upgrade was activated after several months of delays, which were caused by bugs found on its testnet. Originally scheduled for June, Vasil’s launch was delayed by one month due to seven technical bugs that still had to be fixed. In July, IOHK once again postponed the launch to ensure that all involved parties — including exchanges and API developers — were ready for the transition.
Caradno’s upgrade and hard fork was named “Vasil” in honor of the Bulgarian mathematician and Cardano ambassador Vasil St. Dabov, who passed away late last year.
- The Solana network experienced a noticeable slowdown in block production after its most recent 1.14 network upgrade was implemented last week.
- In order to avoid similar issues in the future, one-third of Solana’s core engineers will now be focused on stability and adversarial testing.
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- Cardano’s native token ADA has become the fourth asset to be supported by Sygnum’s staking platform, the rest being ETH, ICP, and YTZ.
- Although Sygnum first debuted its crypto staking service two years ago, it has already become an integral part of its business.
- Dogecoin Core 1.14.6 will further enhanced the memory management of the network to improve its efficiency during congestions.
- The network upgrade also changes the fee mechanism of DOGE, lowering the dust limit for all participants from 1 DOGE to 0.01 DOGE.