Cardano’s Vasil Upgrade Delayed For More Testing

Input Output Global (IOG) was founded by Charles Hoskinson and Jeremy Wood and builds cryptocurrencies and blockchains. It is also the driving force behind Cardano.

The Vasil Upgrade was expected to occur on the last week of July and the Cardano testnet went through the Vasil hardfork on July 3rd in preparation. The Vasil upgrade “will bring significant performance and capability enhancements to Cardano… and will be the most significant network upgrade since the deployment of staking via Shelley.”

In their monthly update video for July, released last night, IOG announced that a few more weeks of testing would be required before the mainnet upgrade.

Cardano is up 6.29% in the past 24 hours and 24 hour volume has jumpted 25.9% amongst the market-wide recovery. Cardano is back to the 7th largest crypto by marketcap after being dethroned briefly by XRP a little over a week ago. The market caps for ADA and XRP are very close and currently differ by less than $100,000.

In addition to the performance upgrades, the Vasil hard fork should also lower transaction fees. The average transaction fees on the blockchain are already well under $1, usually around 0.16 $ADA or a few cents. Smart contract functionalities will be improved but puts more focus on scaling and network/ledger optimization. The Alonzo era/update introduced smart contract support for the platform in September 2021.
The upgrade should also help additional Dapp projects launch on the Cardano platform.

IOG originally allotted four weeks following the testnet hard fork to allow operators, developers, and exchanges to test and upgrade before the mainnet fork. But this time was to ensure that the upgrade process is done only when developers and SPOs (stake pool operators) are ready for the upgrade.