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On September 22, 2022, the long-awaited Vasil update of Cardano went live. The hard fork is designed to boost the development potential of Cardano’s Decentralized Applications (DApps) and increase the ecosystem’s scalability and overall transaction throughput externally.
Let’s take a look at the changes that the new phase of Cardano will bring. But first, let’s see what a hard fork is.
What is a hard fork?
The Cardano blockchain network is a chain of blocks that is constantly updated and contains data such as transaction records. It is secure and decentralized by validators compensated by rewards in ADA.
Hard fork events are held as the Cardano blockchain evolves over time to assist users by updating the network, introducing new advancements to the current blockchain in the future, or deviating from the existing blockchain.
There have been several hard fork events for Cardano in the past, such as the Mary hard fork, which provided native assets and allowed developers to create unique tokens on the network.
About Cardano’s Vasil Hard Fork
The Vasyl hard fork brought many improvements to the network’s power. One is Cardano’s smart contract programming language, Plutus, which enables Cardano Decentralized Application (dApp) development and is named after Bulgarian mathematician Vasil Dabov, who was a prominent Cardano ambassador but has since passed away.
Vasil proposed to address these concerns by introducing a “diffusion pipeline” into the Cardano blockchain, improving the Plutus smart contract language for dApp developers, significantly increasing network bandwidth, and reducing block transfer latency.
The main goals of the Vasil hard fork are to improve the Cardano network for all its users and improve the development environment for Cardano developers who use Plutus to build their decentralized applications.
Changes to the Cardano network
The rest of the upgrades went into effect on September 27, 2022, although the first phase of the hard fork began on September 22, 2022. The second phase of the hard fork will focus on redefining Plutus’ pricing structure, which directly affects development and processing. Memory costs required to control Cardano’s native smart contracts.
The team also found it difficult to work on developing a scalable Layer-2 solution, the Hydra head protocol, that can process transactions from the Cardano blockchain while still using it as its core security and computation layer. This work is in addition to the Vasil upgrade.
Up to this point, the Cardano team’s most recent release revealed that it had successfully fixed an issue with the Hydra node framework. Currently, there is no clear date for the publication of the protocol. However, the IOHK team hinted that the offering could hit the market as early as the first quarter of 2023 or by 2022.
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