The Cardano network clearly focuses on developing smart contracts, as demonstrated by the successful implementation of the Vasil upgrade last year. This has led to a growth in decentralized applications and a corresponding increase in on-chain activity on the network.
Data from Defillama indicates that decentralized exchanges like Minswap, WingRiders, SundaeSwap, and MuesliSwap have seen an upsurge in the total value locked in recent weeks.
In response, the Cardano network intends to make further upgrades to ensure its DeFi ecosystem remains scalable and competitive with other smart contract-enabled blockchains, such as Solana, Binance Smart Chain, and Ethereum. This proof-of-stake (PoS) secured blockchain must continuously evolve to meet the demands of the market and regulations.
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The Cardano network intends to enable multi-chain communications to help DeFi developers build unilaterally scalable Dapps. Moreover, such an upgrade will put the Cardano network ahead of other competing blockchains amid the intensified bear market. In a bid to enable building cross-chain applications efficiently, Input Output Global (IOG) is adding new built-in functions to support ECDSA and Schnorr signatures along with Cardano’s native signature.
Reportedly, the ADA community is already helping to test this new functionality dubbed SECP or SECP256k1, which will initially be deployed on the Cardano devnet. From that point, the functionality will undergo continuous testing on preview and pre-production environments.
Once the community is comfortable that test benchmarks have been achieved and critical indicators have been met, IOG will initiate mainnet deployment via a hard fork combinator event on February 14.
The overall effect is expected to be increased on-chain activity in the Cardano market that reported total liquidation of about $2.13 million in the past 24 hours. Notably, ADA price traded around $0.364407 on Friday, down approximately 6.4 percent in the past 24 hours.
Source: https://coinpedia.org/altcoin/cardano-unveils-new-vasil-upgrade-to-boost-smart-contract-development/