Now that Cardano (ADA) has upgraded to its Vasil hard fork, an upgrade designed to give its network more functionality, we tell you all the details. The developers promise that Vasil will improve smart contracts, increase throughput capacity and reduce fees.
Cardano’s largest infrastructure company, Input Output, named the latest update “Vasil” after Vasil St. Babov, a Cardano ambassador who died in 2021.
Vasil activates version 2 of Cardano’s native smart contract programming language known as “Plutus.” The development team promises that it will be compatible with Version 1. Version 2 of Plutus is expected to be released tomorrow, September 27, a time after the activation of the Vasil hard fork.
#Vasil mainnet HFC event successful!🍾
We’re happy to announce that today, at 21:44:00 UTC, the IOG team, in collaboration with the @CardanoStiftung, successfully hard forked the Cardano mainnet via an HFC event, thus deploying new #Vasil features to the chain.
🧶1/5— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) September 22, 2022
Cardano retired Vasil DevNet, which it had used to test updates on the Vasil hard fork. For future development, you will use different test environments: Preview and Preproduction.
Vasil also changes the way contracts handle unspent transaction inputs and outputs (UTXO). Previously, contracts could only access data on the Cardano blockchain by spending and recreating UTXO. Referral scripts can now prevent the creation of new transactions, which can reduce congestion at the base layer of the blockchain.
The fork triggers Cardano Improvement Proposal CIP-0040 which changes transaction validation for scripts. Previously, if a script failed Phase 2 validation, you could lose all funds in the collateral UTXO. Now, if the script fails validation, it will only use the contributed funds as collateral and send the remaining funds to a specified exchange address.
Yesterday, the IOG and @CardanoStiftung teams successfully triggered the Vasil upgrade on the #Cardano mainnet 👏
Today, the team has successfully submitted the Plutus V2 cost model to mainnet, making full #Vasil capability available to devs after the next epoch, Sept. 27.
— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) September 23, 2022
Cardano promises to slightly improve the decentralization of block production by removing a parameter that benefited data center-based block production. He also worked to make block verification faster without compromising security by removing one of the two required verifiable random functions (VRFs).
Exchanges that were prepared for Cardano’s Vasil upgrade?
Major exchanges like Binance announced support for Cardano’s Vasil hard fork. Hardware wallet maker Ledger also announced compatibility. Some Cardano-based dApps like Revuto have been updated to support the upgrade.
Cardano says that 80% of Staking Pool Operator nodes, 90% of exchanges, and the top ten Total Value Locked (TVL) dApps have prepared for Vasil. Input Output recommended that investors holding their ADA tokens on an exchange double check to ensure the exchange is hard fork ready.
Martify Labs announced the Mesh development package shortly after the Vasil hard fork. According to the Martify Labs website, Mesh is a Cardano-based software development kit for developing dApps.
Podcast host Rick McCracken conducted a test attack on Cardano shortly after the Vasil hard fork went live – his attack failed.
Cardano’s upcoming enhancements include “broadcast pipeline,” a method of improving Cardano’s speed and scalability by propagating blocks before they are fully validated. The broadcast pipeline will still require header validation. This upgrade will not require a hard fork.
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