 
 
Cardano maintainer IOG has confirmed the news that will undoubtedly excite the legion of ADA fans. The community coordinator at IOG, Rebecca Hopwood, has revealed that an upcoming long-awaited upgrade has been scheduled for Valentine’s Day.
The SECP upgrade, now dubbed “Valentine”, will introduce new Plutus SECP cryptographic primitives to the Cardano chain. The proposal was submitted on Thursday by a joint Input Output, Cardano Foundation, and EMURGO technical team after a period of testing in a virtual testing environment that imitates real-world performance and close collaboration with stake pool operators (SPOs), developers, and exchange engineering teams. The upgrade is expected to take effect on February 14 at 21:44:51 UTC.
“We are thrilled to announce that the Valentine upgrade is finally upon us, marking a critical milestone in the evolution of the Cardano network,” IOG’s Hopwood posited.
The upgrade involves taking the Cardano mainnet to protocol v8. Cardano node users and SPOs are required to upgrade their nodes to the latest version. Notably, versions prior to 1.35.4 will not be compatible with v8 and will not work on the mainnet after the update goes live.
The Valentine upgrade is said to bring an array of advantages to the Cardano community, including improved cross-chain decentralized application (dapp) development and more interoperability. This feature on Cardano will allow developers to create apps that connect Cardano to other chains. This would give access to users of other chains to interact seamlessly with financial services offered by Cardano dapps.
 
 
The Next Big Catalyst?
The Valentine upgrade is just one of the latest in a series of recent updates coming out of the Cardano network.
Interest in Cardano DeFi is skyrocketing owing to the launch of the network’s overcollateralized stablecoin, Djed (DJED), from DeFi service provider COTI earlier this month. Djed is pegged to the U.S. dollar and backed by Cardano’s native token ADA. It uses Shen (SHEN) token as its reserve coin and requires more than 400% in collateral value to be posted before it is issued to a user.
Due to these network enhancements, Cardano enthusiasts remain optimistic about the long-term growth of ADA. In the near term, however, analysts generally lean toward a downside price movement for the coin because of the U.S. SEC’s ongoing clampdown on crypto staking. News that crypto exchange Kraken will immediately discontinue its staking platform and pay $30 million to settle SEC charges has sent shockwaves through the crypto sector.
ADA trades at $0.362 as of press time, a more than 5% drop over the past 24 hours.
Source: https://zycrypto.com/cardano-set-to-get-a-major-performance-upgrade-on-valentines-day-ada-boom-on-the-way/