Launch Date of Vasil Hard Fork From Cardano Rescheduled

On June 22, Cardano announced postponing the Vasil hard fork upgrade. The news from the main developer of Cardano Input Output reported that the launch would be delayed by nearly a month and is slated for the last week of July. The upgrade was supposed to roll out four new network enhancements by June 29.

The Vasil hard fork is Cardano’s biggest upgrade since the Alonzo hard fork that came out last September. The new upgrade was designed to provide the Cardano network with four new enhancements, namely CIP31, CIP32, CIP33, and CIP40. These additions were expected to address some of the fundamental issues of the network like throughput, gas cost, etc.

First of all, these enhancements will rewrite the Plutus Scripts on the Cardano network. The combined efforts of these additions will significantly increase the network throughput and bring down the gas costs for transactions.

However, the primary goal of the upgrade is to address the concurrency issue that has been hampering the scalability of the network in recent times. So it tops the anticipated results from the Vasil hard fork upgrade.

To give more time to exchanges and other projects in the ecosystem, the IOG has now increased the window between the expected testnet mainnet releases by nearly four weeks. And what’s more, the developer’s team has found seven flaws in the upgrade before its launch on the testnet. Yet, none of these flaws are rated critical and will be resolved in the coming weeks.

Nigel Hemsley, Head of delivery and products at Input Output, stated that an upgrade of such a level as Vasil should not be rushed for any reason. Moreover, it also gives developers the time to double-check everything before it goes for the testnet. The decision to postpone currently puts the upgrade into the “Basho” period.

Cardano is among the top dogs of the crypto market with a market cap of 17 billion us dollars. The Vasil upgrade may push Cardano up in the list in the coming months as it expects to address some fundamental issues like scalability, gas, and throughput. Furthermore, it could significantly increase the number of on-chain dApps after the mainnet launch.