The long-awaited Cardano vasil hard fork has now been successfully completed and launched on its testnet. This means that soon, all the major changes and upgrades attached to the fork will be accessible on the mainnet.
Although, expectations are that the vasil upgrade would launch on the Cardano (ADA) mainnet in about a month, the exact time will depend on however long it takes for the project developers to be fully ready with their tools.
Additionally, hard fork-ing the mainnet would also be determined by the readiness of the “ecosystem partners”.
But nonetheless, project developers, exchanges, as well as stake pool operators (SPO) have been advised that they may begin test-running their works on the testnet.
We're now inviting SPOs, developers #BuildingOnCardano and exchanges to commence their final testing and integration processes.
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— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) July 3, 2022
New Features
Meanwhile, the announcement also hints at what to expect from completing the Vasil hard fork on the mainnet.
Firstly, block creation will become faster. There will also be an improved scalability experience for Cardano-based decentralized apps (DApps).
However, the most important addition of this current upgrade is the interoperability feature. That is, the Vasil upgrade will allow Cardano sidechains to inter-operate easily. In fact, developers mostly focused on integrating this feature during this Bansho phase of the blockchain’s development. Recall, Bansho is the fourth phase, which will be followed by the Voltaire phase – where governance will be focused on.
Before the Bansho phase, was Goguen. That was the phase that saw the addition of smart contract capabilities to Cardano. But as ecosystem tracker Cardano Cube claims, Goguen was what led many decentralized finance (DeFi) developers to launch most of today’s decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and DeFi protocols.
Apart from performance upgrades, however, developers now also stand to enjoy much lower costs, and better script performance and efficiency.
Excitement Not as Expected
It is noteworthy that despite the testnet hard fork announcement, there has been little or no changes to Cardano (ADA)’s price. As of writing, ADA is up only a measly 0.20% in the last 24 hours, per CoinMarketcap data.
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