“The Vasil upgrade heralds the dawn of a new era for the Cardano ecosystem and the decentralized finance space at large.” — Shahaf Bar-Geffen, CEO of Coti
Launched in 2017, the Cardano blockchain was brought to life by Ethereum co-founder Charles Hoskinson. The project quickly rose to prominence and gained the support of a loyal community. Cardano’s ultimate goal is to provide a stable ecosystem within the crypto industry.
The Vasil hard fork was one of Cardano’s most significant developments on its roadmap. The update improved the platform’s smart contracts, transaction throughput capacity and overall scalability. It was named after Vasil St. Dabov, who passed away in 2021 and was a Bulgarian mathematician and prominent member of the Cardano community.
Vasil was initially scheduled to launch in June but met development difficulties and bugs, leading Cardano developer Input Output Hong Kong to announce delays. Despite the challenges, IOHK submitted an updated proposal for the hard fork on June 30, finally kicking off the countdown for the upgrade. On July 4, Vasil was finally launched on Cardano’s testnet, with investors accumulating almost 80 million ADA despite technical indicators looking bleak for the coin. The upgrade met more development challenges, leading to another delay. On July 28, IOHK released a YouTube video announcing the delay, saying the firm had been focusing on solving issues on the testnet.
Adding to Cardano’s problems, developer Adam Dean took to Twitter to describe the testnet as “catastrophically broken” because of a bug that created incompatible forks. Hoskinson defended the project and described the narrative as unfair and damaging. According to the founder, failed testnets could not be conflated with the mainnet since testnets are “constructed and destroyed all the time.”
On Sept. 22 — three months after its target release — the Vasil hard fork finally went live. After its launch, ADA saw a price surge before crashing, a pattern seen in previous Cardano hard forks.
The effects of the Vasil hard fork will undoubtedly be further felt in 2023, as the upgrade resulted in the network becoming faster, gaining more DApp development capacity and implementing better security. This will help Cardano breathe new life into its ambitious roadmap. Of course, the developers are expected to update and revise features to ensure smooth sailing for the blockchain in 2023. The Vasil hard fork is also expected to complement Djed, a stablecoin project developed by Coti and IOHK. The digital asset was previously referred to as an algorithmic stablecoin, but the developers coined a new name for the project: “overcollateralized stablecoin.” Coti CEO Shahaf Bar-Geffen is hopeful that the project will help Cardano become a major contender for stablecoin transactions.
While there is no definite date yet, the Cardano network is expected to launch a layer-2 scaling solution called “Hydra: Head Protocol,” which aims to make the network faster by using off-chain staking pools called Hydra nodes to process transactions. Each Hydra node is expected to be able to process 1,000 transactions per second. The Cardano team hinted that this update might be launched within the first quarter of 2023 if things go as planned.
