As of Thursday, September 21 at 9:44 pm UTC, the long-awaited Cardano Vasil upgrade and hard fork has gone live, bringing with it “significant performance and capability” improvements to the blockchain.
On Thursday, blockchain company IOHK announced the success of the Cardano mainnet hard fork via Twitter.
Others watched the hard fork tick over in a live Twitter Spaces with Cardano co-founder Charles Hoskinson.
#Vasil mainnet HFC event successful!🍾
We’re happy to announce that today, at 21:44:00 UTC, the IOG team, in collaboration with the @CardanoStiftung, successfully hard forked the Cardano mainnet via a HFC event, thus deploying new #Vasil features to the chain.
🧶1/5— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) September 22, 2022
IOHK has stated in the past that one of the significant upgrades brought about by the fork is the ability for blocks to be transmitted without full validation.
This makes it possible to create blocks more quickly. Upgrades to its Plutus smart contracts, which were designed to increase the platform’s overall efficiency, also make it possible for decentralised applications to be deployed and operated at reduced costs.
Better buy some mouthwash. Vasil is live. Anyone have recommendations for Greg 🙂 https://t.co/RTehxad97Z
— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) September 22, 2022
After one epoch, which typically lasts somewhere in the neighbourhood of five days, new capabilities made possible by upgrades to the Plutus script will be made accessible to developers on the mainnet on September 27.
In a tweet, the founder of the crypto trading firm Abra, Bill Barhydt, referred to the upgrade as “one of the most complex and consequential updates to the Cardano network ever done.” He called the upgrade a “big win for developers” with the decentralised finance (DeFi) platform Genius Yield.
Congrats to Cardano ($ADA) team on Vasil hardfork. More hard work in crypto paying off.
Making UTXO's and inputs accessible to scripts/Plutus without spending them is a big win for developers. Well done!
Congrats @IOHK_Charles @CardanoStiftung and teams!
— Bill Barhydt (@billbarX) September 22, 2022
The date for the upgrade was announced by IOHK at the beginning of September, and the “critical mass indicators” required to initiate the hard fork were reached within the preceding twenty-four hours of the event itself. It arrives after numerous delays and reschedules; the debut date was initially planned for June.
Due to problems on the test net brought on by defects in a previous node version that caused compatibility concerns, it was twice postponed.
This comes after the launch day was originally slated for June. After the completion of the Vasil upgrade, Cardano is moving forward with the development of its layer-2 scaling solution, the Hydra head protocol.
This protocol processes transactions off the Cardano blockchain while continuing to use the blockchain for the security and settlement layers. The most recent update on Hydra, which was published on September 16th, detailed the fact that the team fixed a known problem with the Hydra nodes.
The launch date of the protocol has not been determined with absolute certainty, but it is anticipated to take place in the latter half of 2022 or the first quarter of 2023.
According to data provided by CoinGecko, the announcement of the successful launch caused a nearly 4% increase in the price of Cardano (ADA) over the previous twenty-four hours, bringing it to $0.46. However, the price is still down by more than 4.5% on the week.