Cardano’s Long-Awaited Vasil Upgrade Finally Occurs With Much Initial Success

The Cardano (ADA) blockchain has officially launched its highly anticipated Vasil upgrade, which is intended to greatly increase network capacity and reduce transaction costs. The update occurred shortly after one of Cardano&rsquos main rivals, Ethereum (ETH), launched their own upgrade known as The Merge, which marked the Ethereum blockchains transition from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS).

Whats there to know?

The blockchains developer company Input Output Global (IOG) has dubbed the update, labeled after the late Bulgarian mathematician and prominent Cardano supporter Vasil St. Dabov, the most noteworthy and ambitious Cardano upgrade to date because of its complexity.

Cardano powers over 1,000 decentralized projects along with ADA, a cryptocurrency with a market cap of over $15 billion. The critical upgrade has been delayed several times since its original June deadline. Cardano developer Adam Dean raised an alarm in August about the test networks failures and apparent rushing. In response to the criticisms however, Tim Harrison, Vice President of Community and Ecosystem at IOG, stated that the September 22nd date was fully agreed upon by the community before also mentioning that the developer team had full confidence in the code.

What will Vasil actually accomplish?

The update is expected to release the second version of Plutus, Cardanos smart-contract language, which shall enable developers to build faster and much more complex decentralized applications (dApps) on the chain. Artano, a Cardano-based NFT project that has been testing Plutus V2, reported a decrease of over 90% in transaction size along with a corresponding cost reduction of more than 75%.

Most notably, the Vasil upgrade will use Cardanos hard fork combinator technology which, according to Cardano developer IOG, introduces brand new features without losing any data from the blockchains previous version. The new Plutus script upgrades will also make additional capabilities available to developers on the mainnet on September 27th after one epoch, which currently lasts about five days.

In any case, the upgrade was described as one of the most complex and consequential updates to the Cardano network ever done. This comment was made by Bill Barhydt, founder of crypto trading platform Abra. In fact, many agree that despite all of the delays and initial problems, the Vasil upgrade is nothing short of a groundbreaking achievement which should be discussed alongside the Merge itself.