Since integrating smart contracts last year in september, Cardano has seen explosive growth in activity on the blockchain creating decentralized applications DAPPS. Named after Bulgarian mathematician Vasil Dabov, prominent Cardano ambassador who passed away recently, the Vasil hard fork will bring numerous upgrades to network capacity and Cardano’s smart contract.
The new Vasil hard fork is Cardano’s attempt to stay ahead of the curve and try to mitigate the increased congestion before it becomes too much of a problem. In order to do this, Cardano will start using a solution called diffusion pipelining. This process will increase transaction speeds and will keep fees low even when there is huge increase of transactions, the motive for this upgrade was Ethereum’s problem with high gas fees due to increased transactions in the blockchain. In the Vasil hard fork, the CIPs implemented are geared around improving the usability, and increasing the capacity of the Plutus smart contract language.
The core of the diffusion pipelining is to have blocks be transmitted without full validation while at the same time making changes to the consensus layer to improve block propagation across nodes.
The body of the block is preserved on the metadata contained in the next block, so that would make the network resistant to DDoS attacks even without full block confirmation. The update will also lead to an increase in the size of the block and would give much more space to data to be saved into each block added to the ledger. These improvements and optimizations will lead to a much faster, scalable and censorship resistant network.
According to a blog post from IOG, the developer behind Cardano, the launch date for the Vasil Hard Fork has been moved back by another four weeks, instead of launching next week as was previously announced, users will have to wait until the last week of July for the hard fork to be completed.
In this blog post, they say that the developers are 95% done with the Plutus V2 test scripts.
Adding the Vasil hard fork was a challenging development and integration. It was the most complicated development and integration the network has ever seen.
An important upgrade such as the Vasil Hard Fork can carry various implications for the price of the digital assets, investors are always trying to time the market, but the upgrade has been delayed another four weeks, pushing the buying window far back.
