Cardano (ADA) is currently the eighth largest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation, with a supply cap of 45 billion coins. It is a peer-to-peer, proof of stake-based Blockchain developed by Charles Hoskinson, who is also one of the co-founders of the Ethereum Blockchain.
Last week, Hoskinson Tweeted about the progress of the Vasil Hard Fork upgrade. Vasil Hard Fork upgrade is expected to improve the network’s performance and Cardano’s Plutus smart contract programming language, which enables the creation of decentralised applications (dApps).
WHAT IS VASIL HARD FORK?
A Hard Fork is a radical change to a network’s protocol and creates a permanent divergence from the previous version of the Blockchain. Miners have to choose which Blockchain to continue verifying. Previously, Bitcoin cash was created by creating a Hard Fork on the Bitcoin Blockchain. The Cardano community has been awaiting Vasil’s upgrade, as it was expected to be in July previously.
The upgrade is expected to bring in a host of changes in terms of transaction fees, scalability of the Decentralised App, as well as in the speed of transactions.
Transaction Fees: The new development will bring about significant network enhancements that will shrink transaction sizes, thereby increasing network throughput, which will result in cutting transaction fees. At present, ADA’s average transaction fees is $0.15 as of August 28, 2022 August, according to the data on Messari.io. Cardano offers the lowest transaction fees after XRP token.
Decentralised Application (dApp) Scalability: It is expected that the upgrade would resolve the current concurrency problem that has seriously hindered the capacity of Cardano’s decentralised applications to scale. Currently, Cardano hosts 1,075 dApps on its platform according to Cardano.
Speed of Transactions: Vasil will allow developers to store and reference information without having to use output. This will optimises transaction throughput and increases the concurrency of the Blockchain. It will also significantly increase the speed of the transactions. The current transaction time is around 20 seconds.
EXCHANGE UPGRADE STATUS
As of now, three crypto exchanges have upgraded to Vasil Hard Fork, while 22 exchanges are still in the process of upgrade. These include Binance and crypto.com.
Hoskinson said in the Tweet that “The next major lift is to get the exchanges on board. Binance is reporting that they’re currently upgrading by volume.”
“Generally, what happens is after a Hard Fork date is announced, you see a big rush and people push through,” he further said in the Tweet.
