Vasil Upgrade Now Live On Cardano’s Testnet

On July 3, Input-Output Global (IOG), previously IOHK, announced that the Vasil network update is now live on Cardano (ADA)’s testnet and is being tested for mainnet deployment. In a bid to improve the network, developers, exchanges, and stake pool operators were urged to launch their projects on the testnet in order to clear out any imperfections before the mainnet launch.

Vasil brings a wide array of improvements, both in scalability and throughput. The hard fork is an essential part of the Basho phase in Cardano’s development – the fourth of a total of five. The previous three phases of improvements focused on the foundation of the network (Byron), decentralization (Shelley), and smart contracts usage (Goguen).

“Vasil is a complex program of work. Projects will need to check backward compatibility and SPOs will need to make some scripting adjustments. The community has requested a 4 week period following the testnet hard fork to allow for SPOs, developers, and exchanges to test and upgrade before we trigger the hard fork for the Cardano mainnet.” the team at IOG noted.

Now, Vasil would take care of the network congestion, after many DeFi projects switched from other blockchains to Cardano. The much-anticipated hard fork utilized the so-called diffusion pipelining, which enables the network to handle more transactions per second.

Prior to Vasil, the proof-of-stake network behind Cardano relied on specific rules which have to happen in an exact sequence in order to process, validate and store a block of data. Now, validators would not have to wait for one validator to process the block in its entirety before passing it on to another one. Rather, thanks to diffusion pipelining, validators could work ahead of block completion and save both time and network resources.

Cardano’s founder, Charles Hoskinson, announced that the Cardano blockchain will undergo a series of other upgrades, along with Vasil, that will increase smart contract functionality, as the network is only almost a year into smart contrast, as they were introduced with the Goguen update in September 2021.

“We recognize that this news will be disappointing to some. However, we are taking an abundance of caution to ensure that we do this deployment correctly.” Nigel Hemsley, head of delivery and projects for Input Output wrote in a blog post, adding that despite the development going smooth, the company behind Cardano cannot push out a strict timeline for the update.

“The teams at Cardano Foundation & IOG will be working closely with exchanges and DApp/tool developers throughout this process. As soon as we are confident that ecosystem partners are comfortable & ready, we’ll submit an updated proposal to upgrade the Cardano mainnet to Vasil,” IOG added.

Cardano price swings up

As expected, the hype around Vasil brought Cardano’s price up by 5% to a current price tag of $0.4666 per ADA token. However, trading volumes are still relatively low, so the price increase may not hold up to the negative pressure that the crypto market is experiencing.

However, ADA’s price increase may be nothing more than following the price tide after a week of bearish price action. Bitcoin, for example, still tries to get afloat of $20,000, but so far – with no luck. Ethereum still holds above $1,100 after forming a strong support zone at $1,000. The rest of the crypto sector is mimicking the 3-5% increase, with only a handful of projects marking anything substantial and only two projects managing to climb 10%+ in the last 24 hours.