Vasil hardfork, Cardano's biggest, most ambitious and complex upgrade has been successfully executed on the blockchain's mainnet after a series of delays and postponements by the team. The Vasil upgrade on Cardano blockchain went live via a Hardfork Combinator Event (HFC) at epoch 356 at 21:44 UTC on September 22, 2022.
"Vasil mainnet HFC event successful! We’re happy to announce that today, at 21:44:00 UTC, the IOG team, in collaboration with the Cardana Foundation, successfully hard forked the Cardano mainnet via a HFC event, thus deploying new Vasil features to the chain," Input Output Global wrote.
Input Output Global (IOG), the entity contracted and tasked with the responsibility of designing, building and maintaining the Cardano platform in collaboration with the Cardano Foundation were the brains behind this successful growth-centered upgrade.
Speaking of the Cardano Foundation, it is a Swiss-based organization saddled with the duty of supervising and overseeing the development of the Cardano blockchain. Both entities have a common goal of driving adoption for the Cardano (ADA) ecosystem. Charles Hoskinson and Jeremy Wood are the co-founders of Input Output Global (IOG).
The Vasil upgrade named after Late Vasil St Dabov, a Bulgarian Mathematician and long-standing member of the Cardano (ADA) community is designed to bring significant performance and capability enhancements to the Cardano (ADA) blockchain founded by Charles Hoskinson, a former co-founder of the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain in 2017.
Vasil Upgrade Impact
This much-talked about upgrade in the crypto community brought many positive modifications to the Charles Hoskinson-founded decentralized proof-of-stake (PoS) smart contract blockchain in line with scalability and network fees.
Beyond making the smart contract platform more scalable, efficient and transaction cost-friendly, the successfully deployed Vasil hardfork combinator event brings about a "higher throughput capability via diffusion pipelining" while also resulting in a better developer experience, Input Output Global tweeted.
Although the Vasil hardfork combinator event began on September 22, full Vasil features were deployed to the Cardano chain and Vasil functionalities opened up for the developer community on September 27. This means that the new Plutus V2 cost model was made active on the blockchain on September 27, at the start of a new epoch,including new capabilities like 'node & CLI support for reference inputs, inline datums, reference script', as revealed by the team.
Plutus, which allows all programming on the Cardano blockchain to be done on one Haskell library is Plutus is the smart contract platform of the Cardano blockchain. Plutus allows developers to write applications that interact with the Cardano blockchain. With the execution of the Vasil upgrade, a better and more efficient version Plutus V2 was rolled out.
Interestingly, a 90%+ decrease in script size and a corresponding cost reduction of over 75% was observed by Artano, a cardano-based NFT project upon utilizing the Plutus V2. Likewise, MuesliSwap which claims to be the first decentralized exchange for Cardano and Milkomeda shared a pre-production transaction details which showed a huge decline in transaction fees when working with Plutus V2.
On Thursday, MuesliSwap tweeted,
"Power of Vasil! We are close to launching our Plutus v2 scripts. Here are some amazing benchmarks showing the upgrade (combining our Orderbook with Liquidity Pools)
Plutus v1 Transaction; Size: 14.73 kB; Fee: 1.44 $ADA
Plutus v2 Transaction; Size: 1.31 kB; Fee: 0.73 $ADA"
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Final Words
Interest in the popular smart contract platform Cardano and its native token, ADA seems to be on the rise following the completion of the long-awaited Vasil upgrade. It is worth mentioning that the number of Cardano wallet addresses have surpassed 3.9 million with a total number of transactions hitting 60.4 million. Plutus scripts on the chain has reached 3,307 while the total Github code is pegged at 23,430.
At the time of writing, ADA is the 8th largest cryptocurrency asset with a market cap of approximately $15 billion, according to data from Coinmarketcap.