Quite recently, the team behind Cardano’s development announced that the Vasil Hardfork had been delayed by a month until the last week of July. IOHK stressed that it had seven more bugs to fix and more time to test.
Cardano is one step closer to the Vasil upgrade
Now that the clock is ticking, IOHK announced yesterday that they submitted an update proposal to hardfork the Cardano testnet. According to the team, the testnet currently has a good chain density to continue “safely” with the fork, as more than 75% of the blocks are made by the new Vasil node.
At this stage, it’s important to note that Cardano is currently in epoch 214 on the testnet. Once the next era begins, the necessary changes and transitions would take place.
As such, the Cardano network divides time into periods called eras. An era lasts about 5 days. This means that if an era starts in the middle of Sunday, it would end in the middle of Friday. Epoch 214 began on June 28 at 8:20 PM, meaning Cardano’s testnet would enter its next new era on July 3.
IOHK marked,
“Once the changes go into effect after the start of Era 215 at 20:20 UTC on July 3, the Cardano testnet will begin to enjoy the new Vasil enhancements and capabilities that we will see on the mainnet shortly.”
Another delay?
Since last September’s Alonzo hardfork, the Vasil hardfork is Cardano’s next most critical update. The said development is intended to reduce the size of transactions and increase the transaction capacity of the network. In addition, transaction costs will also drop, making it Cardano’s “biggest” and “best” upgrade. IOHK emphasizes,
“Vasil enhancements include increased throughput through diffusion pipelining to a better developer experience through vastly improved script performance and efficiency (plus lower costs). It’s Cardano’s biggest and best upgrade yet.”
The team also revealed that the community has requested a minimum period of four weeks to give SPOs, developers and exchanges the time they need to test and upgrade before hard forking the Cardano mainnet. Only when everyone is “comfortable” and “ready” would the same process be followed to upgrade the mainnet.
Now, four weeks from July 3rd means the actual HFC event will likely take place in early August rather than the pre-suggested end of July. Since this is “the most complex program” the team has undertaken, they are in no rush and want the boat to run smoothly. IOHK noted,
“…our primary concern is to ensure that we manage this upgrade in a secure manner.”
In terms of price, Cardano’s original token has remained inert. In recent months, ADA has barely responded to network upgrades/ecosystem related dev. Moreover, as highlighted in an article yesterday, the state of the on-chain stats is not all that appealing right now. So the likelihood of an ADA pump around the time of the testnet upgrade seems to be pretty slim at this point.