Learning It the Right Way

Cardano, one of the lucrative third-generation blockchains, has kept the crypto community engaged in anticipation with the news of its network’s slow yet periodic upgrades. In the crypto space, Cardano is best known for establishing itself as the actively developing blockchain.  IOHK and Emurgo, the core developing firms of Cardano, laid out a detailed development roadmap to solve the common blockchain trilemma. 

After thorough peer-reviewed research, the team tailored a sequential framework to confer security, scalability, interoperability, and sustainability to the Cardano ecosystem. Cardano hard forks are the key players in the network’s development.

A Brief Insight Into The Cardano Hard Forks 

Since its launch into the crypto space, Cardano is well known for its gradually sequential hard fork events. Right from 2015, the core team of Cardano rolled out the network’s functionalities step by step through different technical phases. 

The Cardano founders, IOHK and Emurgo, categorized these phases into five prominent eras. The five stages were named after eminent poets, writers, and programmers: Byron, Shelley, Goguen, Basho, and Voltaire.

The Federated Phase – Byron

Byron is the foundational version of the Cardano blockchain. This version enabled the trade of Cardano’s native cryptocurrency, ADA. It sort of attracted users and established the Cardano community in the crypto space. 

After thorough peer-reviewed academic research, the developers rolled out the Byron mainnet in September 2017 as a federated blockchain. Byron era marks a significant integration of the Ouroboros Classic, Cardano’s secure proof-of-stake protocol into the Cardano ecosystem. 

During the Byron phase, Cardano witnessed the launch of two new wallets. Daedalus wallet, a desktop wallet from IOHK, and Yoroi wallet, a light wallet from Emurgo, were introduced for managing the ADA transactions.

The Phase of Decentralization – Shelley

The transition from a federated blockchain into a decentralized blockchain is characteristic of the Shelley era. Staking pools and staking rewards were introduced in Cardano via the Shelley upgrade. It enabled the ADA holders to earn staking rewards. Thus, Shelley testnet is known for rolling out the incentivized testnet (ITN) on Cardano. The incentivized testnet laid the foundation for the Shelley testnet.

Two crucial hard forks of the Shelley era are to be noted.

Allegra Hard Fork

Allegra brought up the ‘token locking’ mechanism. It enabled users to lock their tokens in the staking pools and participate in the on-chain governance. Allegra hard fork successfully commenced and went live on the testnet on December 16, 2020.

Mary Hard Fork

Mary hard fork installed the multi-asset ledger support to the Cardano blockchain. It enabled developers and users to create and deploy multi-assets a.k.a ‘native tokens’ on Cardano. In the Mary tesnet, Cardano native tokens can be generated without the execution of smart contracts. With this recent upgrade, both fungible tokens and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) can be minted on Cardano.

The Mary hard fork went live on the testnet on March 1, 2021. Generally, on Ethereum, native tokens are required to be based on a custom code. These custom codes paved the way for the possibilities of bug intervention. In contrast, Cardano resolves this issue by eliminating the need for custom code for native tokens. It requires users to deploy ADA tokens as the service or transaction fees.

The Era of Smart Contracts and dApps – Goguen

The Goguen era is a significant phase as it rolled out the smart contracts functionality on the Cardano blockchain. The launch of Plutus, Cardano’s native smart contract language, is worthy of note. The Alonzo hard fork steals the spotlight of the Goguen era. 

Alonzo Hard Fork

The Alonzo testnet’s development unfolded in 4 color phases, namely, blue, white, purple, red, and black. It focused on building up the smart contract functionality by gradually increasing the range of network participants who can be hosted on Cardano. The initial Alonzo blue, white and purple phases saw the expansion of the capabilities of the smart contracts and the enhancement of its complexity.  

The final two phases, Alonzo red and black, took care of the bug fixes and ensured that the Alonzo testnet was completely ready for the launch. The initial Plutus capability conferred to the blockchain paved way for the creation, and operation of dApps. The Alonzo update went live on September 12, 2021. Thus, aiding Cardano to transform into a smart contract-based blockchain.

The Era of Scalability & Interoperability – Basho

Cardano has planned the Basho era for 2022. This development phase primarily focuses on upgrading the network’s scalability and interoperability. Cardano developers aim to launch interoperable sidechains that will bridge multi-blockchains with the Cardano mainnet.

The Vasil hard fork is one of the most-anticipated Cardano hard forks of 2022. It marks the beginning of Cardano’s Basho era.

Cardano Hard Fork 2022 – Vasil Hard Fork

Vasil hard fork commenced and went live on the testnet on July 3, 2022. The fork was supposed to occur in June but was delayed due to specific bug issues, the team had to postpone it to this July. This fork was named after Vasil Dabov, a Bulgarian mathematician and a former Cardano ambassador. With the Vasil upgrade, a new feature called diffusion pipelining is integrated onto Cardano. Increasing the block size and accelerating the block production process might pose certain limitations and security threats to the consensus layer. 

The diffusion pipeline aims to resolve this major limitation. This updation facilitates the smooth expansion of the block size and confers high throughput to the consensus layer. Matthias Fitzi, Cardano’s researcher, revealed that the block size has already been subjected to a 25% expansion in 2022.  

Plutus smart contracts core has also witnessed an upgrade via this Vasil hard fork. 

After the successful forking of the Vasil upgrade onto the mainnet, there are a series of events lined up for Cardano. Firstly, the migration of the Cardano stablecoin, Djed, onto the mainnet. Secondly, the launch and operation of ErgoDEX, a EUTXO model-based cross-chain DEX on Ergo and Cardano. Most importantly, the creation and launch of several decentralized apps (dApps) on the Cardano ecosystem.

The Era of Sustainability – Voltaire

The Voltaire, the final era of the Cardano roadmap, on its completion would confer more sustainability to the Cardano network. The Voltaire era highlights the inclusion of a voting and treasury system within the Cardano ecosystem. 

Simultaneous Evolution of Cardano’s Ouroboros

Ouroboros was first launched in 2017 on the Byron testnet. Ouroboros Classic is the first iteration of the protocol. But it was highly susceptible to attacks and bug issues. Later in February 2020, Ouroborous Classic underwent a traditional hard fork to upgrade into the Ouroborous BFT.

Ouroborous BFT was developed from the Classic version after getting integrated with the Byzantine Fault tolerance. It laid the foundation for the Shelley testnet. The next phase, Ouroborous Praos, enabled the blockchain to be fragmented into epochs and slots. This upgrade enhanced the network’s security and scalability by deploying more randomness into the protocol. The current Cardano blockchain is functioning on the Praos protocol.

The team has scheduled the subsequent stages of Ouroboros, Genesis, and Chronos, in the upcoming years. Ouroboros Genesis focuses on deploying SNARKs and installing privacy-centric mechanisms on the ledger. Genesis is included in the Cardano roadmap 2022. The latter phase, Chronos, will eventually roll out a novel time synchronization mechanism to aid the development of a “cryptographically secure ledger”. 

What’s so unique about the Cardano hard forks?

Obviously, it is the smooth and frictionless transitions of the upgraded testnets. All credits to the hero, Cardano’s “Hard Fork Combinator” (HFC). Generally, a hard fork initiates radical changes on the associated blockchain, causing the network to split up. The blocks on the old chain are in no way compatible with that of the newly forked chain. Thereby, certain interruptions do occur after the completion of a hard fork.

But here in Cardano, these problems are eliminated by the HFC. It confers a frictionless transition to the new protocol without causing any interruptions in the blockchain and discards the need for a restart. Moreover, it integrates the history of the old chain’s blocks with the new chain. Most importantly, the HFC allows the nodes to undergo gradual updation, ensuring uninterrupted functioning. 

Key Players of the Cardano Ecosystem

Ouroborous & Cardano’s Architecture

Ouroboros is the most secure proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus protocol of Cardano. It is regarded as the prime player of Cardano. This protocol enabled the breakdown of Cardano eras into epochs and each epoch was demarcated into slots. Similar to nodes in the classic PoS protocol, slots are crucial in the block validation process. A slot leader is elected and allocated to each slot. The elected slot leader is responsible for validating and adding blocks to the blockchain.

Cardano has a peculiar architecture. The blockchain is composed of two distinct layers, the Settlement layer, and the Computational layer. Execution of smart contracts and token transactions occur simultaneously but on separate layers.

The crypto assets transfers are recorded on the settlement layer, whereas the smart contract-related computations are recorded on the computational layer. 

Plutus – Cardano’s Native Smart Contract Scripts

Plutus is the native programming language meant for Cardano’s smart contracts. The script language was derived from the Haskell language and Lambda Calculus. Plutus is distinguished into two parts, Plutus Core which is responsible for the on-chain code, and Plutus Application Framework (PAF) which is responsible for the off-chain code. The transactions are built by PAF and the validation procedure for the transactions is run via on-chain code.

ADA Price and the Hard Forks

The price of the native crypto, Cardano (ADA) hasn’t exhibited any remarkable price rally so far. Investors do wait in anticipation to experience the post-fork upgrades on the third-generation blockchain. 

The core developing team of Cardano have a proper academic approach to formulating the development roadmap for future upgrades within the network. Cardano’s “seamless protocol transitions” and active development would continue to be speculated among the crypto community.

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