(Kitco News) - Cardano has officially deployed its highly anticipated Vasil hard fork upgrade to its mainnet, a development that has been called one of the most significant updates yet for the Cardano ecosystem.
The upgrade went live on Thursday, September 22nd, at 9:44 UTC, following several delays and unexpected roadblocks.
Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson spoke about what to expect from the upgrade in an interview prior to the Vasil implementation, noting that “A lot of improvements under the hood make it significantly easier to build scalable apps on Cardano.”
One of the biggest changes introduced by the upgrade is an increase in block size, which will help address the issues of high transaction costs, speed and scalability. A larger block size enables the blockchain to store more data in each block, helping the network to increase its input while slashing its transactional costs at the same time.
?? The Vasil upgrade will bring significant performance & capability enhancements to #Cardano, from higher throughput capability via diffusion pipelining to a better developer experience with much improved script performance, efficiency & lower costs.
— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) September 22, 2022
2/5
The upgrade will also help improve the smart contract capabilities of the network, which should improve the functionality of decentralized applications (DApps) hosted on Cardano.
“Vasil enhances Cardano's smart contract capabilities through Plutus v2, which adds greater efficiency to an already powerful smart contract platform,” Tim Harrison, VP of Community and Engagement wrote in a technical explainer. “Vasil leverages the EUTXO model to enable faster and more sophisticated DApps.”
Many of the updates are highly technical in nature and require specialized knowledge to fully grasp what they mean for the network. Overall, the upgrade is likely to attract new protocols to the network thanks to its enhanced capabilities.
“Such a broad scope of enhancements means that the Cardano ecosystem will see brand new DApps and new improved DApps (after updating and auditing) begin deploying during Q4 and beyond,” Harrison said.
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The new capabilities enabled by the Plutus script upgrades will be available to developers on the mainnet beginning Sept. 27, after the passage of one epoch, which currently lasts around five days.
On the roadmap for Cardano following Vasil is the continued development of its layer-2 scaling solution, the Hydra head protocol, which processes transactions off the Cardano blockchain while still using it as the security and settlement layer.
In response to the upgrade, the price of Cardano’s ADA token rallied 12.4% from a low of $0.429 on Wednesday to a high of $0.482 on Friday morning, but has since sold off in a “buy the rumor, sell the news” type fashion. At the time of writing, ADA is trading at $0.454.
