Just a few meters from the next stage destination: Cardano is heading for the next hard fork. With the “Vasil” upgrade planned for the end of July, the blockchain will get a performance boost, which should be noticeable on many levels. But what concrete improvements are there?
The next stage of development
For the sake of clarity, the development of Cardano is divided into several phases. The network is currently in the “Basho era”, named after the Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō. After the previous sections have expanded the scope of action, for example by integrating smart contracts, Cardano will be upscaled at this stage. More transactions, faster processing and a focus on interoperability: in Basho, Cardano is geared towards mass adoption. The Hard Fork Vasil is an important component in this.
Which, according to Charles Hoskinson, does not have a direct impact on the “average Cardano user”. “We are making network improvements, consensus improvements with pipelining, we are updating significant changes to the Plutus language,” says the Cardano BOSS, who speaks of Vasil as the “biggest and most significant” hard fork “we have ever made”.
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Cardano flips the switch
However, users do not go out empty. The upgrade will “increase Cardano’s throughput,” Hoskinson explains, ”and optimize the system to accommodate a growing number of decentralized finance applications (DeFi), smart contracts and DEXs (decentralized exchanges)”. Ultimately, all Cardano users benefit from this.
”Roughly speaking, smart contacts will become more efficient and cheaper,” Cardano developer Lars Brünjes sums up the benefits compared to BTC-ECHO. The smart contracts “need less memory and thus also less transaction fees”. A win-win situation“ ”It will be faster and cheaper for users and there will be more opportunities for developers to write even more powerful smart contracts that also do more,” says the mathematician with a doctorate.
And after that?
Vasil is an important, but not the only puzzle piece of the Basho scaling era. In addition, sidechains will be expanded, which will increase the token transfer and thus the interoperability of Cardano with other networks. Another focus is on the layer 2 scaling solution “Hydra”. Based on the many-headed monster from Greek mythology, Hydra allows the parallel execution of transactions without burdening the mainnet. ”The rough idea behind it is that transactions are not carried out on the blockchain, but offchain, so to speak,“ says Brünjes.
After the scaling wave, Cardano finally enters its last cycle: the Voltaire era, in which control of the network is gradually transferred to users. During the section, everything revolves around governance, users receive more co-determination rights. There is still a lot to do, until the final Cardano some hard forks are likely to pass.
