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What Is Cardano's Vasil Hard Fork Upgrade?

What Is Cardano's Vasil Hard Fork Upgrade?

Beginner
2022-09-21 | 5m

Cardano’s Blockchain Vasil Hard Fork Upgrade is set in this September 22, let’s discover how this upgrade will influence Cardano’s blockchain as well as the whole crypto ecosystem.

Introduction

What is Cardano?

Cardano, which was founded in 2015, sees itself as an improved version of Ethereum and has positioned itself as a "third-generation" platform with Solana (SOL), Polkadot (DOT), and others. Giving the unbanked people of the globe access to banking services is another significant objective of Cardano. With its own native coin, ADA, Cardano is a public blockchain platform that is open-source and decentralized and enables peer-to-peer transactions. It is the biggest cryptocurrency to utilize a proof-of-stake blockchain, which is seen as a more environmentally friendly alternative to proof-of-work protocols like bitcoin.

What is a hard fork?

When users of a blockchain network choose to split the chain, two different networks or protocols are created. This is known as a hard fork. The hard fork may change the blockchain's transaction prices, validation rates, and incentives for mining. It can also assist in enhancing functionality, introducing new features, and closing security gaps in its protocol.

What is Cardano's Vasil Hard Fork Upgrade?

Cardano is sometimes criticized because its smart contract capabilities are seen as lagging behind the Ethereum blockchain. Vasil, Cardano's long-awaited update, despite multiple delays, is anticipated to begin on this September 22 and end five days later. This hard fork also delivers an updated version of Cardano’s smart contract ing language: Plutus v2. It will enhance the Plutus language, enabling more potent applications, together with expanded network bandwidth and less expensive transactions.

Vasil preparations have been ongoing throughout the entire Cardano ecosystem for some years. SPOs, DApp developers, exchanges, and the core engineering teams at IOG and the Cardano Foundation have all made significant testing and integration efforts, with promising outcomes. A joint IOG/Cardano Foundation team will put Vasil into use on September 22 at the protocol level utilizing the hard fork combinator. On September 27th, developers will be able to use the new features on mainnet, along with a new Plutus cost model, and node and CLI support for reference inputs, inline datums, reference s, and collateral outputs.

The Vasil Hard Fork upgrade will help improve these three main things:

- Transaction costs will be reduced as a result of the new development's major network improvements, which will result in smaller transaction sizes and higher network performance. As of August 2022, the statistics on Messari.io shows that the average transaction fee for ADA is $0.15. After the XRP token, Cardano has the lowest transaction fees.

- Scalability of Decentralized Applications (dApps): It is anticipated that the upgrade will address the concurrent issue that has significantly hampered the ability of Cardano's decentralized applications to scale. Cardano claims that 1,075 dApps are currently supported on its platform.

- Transaction speed: This upgrade will enable users to store and reference data without using output. This will increase concurrency on the Blockchain and transaction throughput. It will also significantly speed up the transactions. At this time, transactions take about 20 seconds to complete.

What does this Vasil Hard Fork mean for the ecosystem?

First and foremost, DApp developers will be able to create more robust and effective blockchain-based apps thanks to these developments, while diffusion pipelining opens up the possibility for increased throughput and network capacity.

For the broader crypto ecosystem, the Vasil hard fork may be an indirect booster to the ecosystem’s growth. The Terra’s crashing left many DeFi projects ‘homeless’, key stakeholders, and developers, of course, looking for a new home. As mentioned earlier, with Cardano planning to make smart contracts more usable, which will bring in more projects to the chain, there has never been a more opportune moment.

Conclusion

Even though the most recent news and upgrades managed to drive the price higher and inspire great enthusiasm in the Cardano ecosystem, this project still has a long way to go, given that market conditions are still bearish and prices of all the major cryptocurrencies are printing lower highs and lower lows. In an extremely fast-paced sector, Cardano is renowned for taking its time and operating relatively slowly, whereas other projects like Solana, NEAR, and Avalanche have already developed significantly more scalable and quick networks. Cardano should ramp up the pace while maintaining high-caliber product output if it wants to remain in the top blockchains for the next ten years.

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