Cardano’s Vasil hard fork is coming up on September 22nd 2022. The upgrade will continue until September 27th, 2022.
First, we have to answer two questions for those who may not know already. What is Cardano? And what is a fork?
Cardano is a blockchain software platform that allows developers to use smart contracts to build all sorts of decentralized applications. Its token is $ADA, and it is one of the largest cryptocurrencies by market cap. Cardano uses proof of stake as a consensus method.
A fork is an upgrade in which a new, improved version of the blockchain is created from the existing blockchain. It results in a split of a blockchain, one that follows the old rules, and one that uses the new upgraded rules. The old and the new blockchains share the same history up until the point of the fork. After that point, they are treated as two different blockchains and will have their own separate tokens and any future transactions are recorded only on the blockchain used.
Cardano is about to go through a forking event.
In this post you will learn what Cardano’s Vasil hard fork is, how it will improve Candano, and what to expect.
What is Cardano’s Vasil Hard Fork?
Cardano’s Vasil hard fork is the next upgrade in the Cardano roadmap that you can see above.
This fork is part of a bigger upgrade focused on helping Cardano scale better. Currently, we are in Phase 4, the Basho phase.
Earlier in 2021, was the Goguen phase. This upgrade was responsible for implementing smart contracts into the Cardano blockchain. Smart contracts are incredibly important to Cardano because they allow developers to build decentralized apps, which can be anything like decentralized exchanges, games, finance apps, or compatibility for NFTs.
Now that smart contracts have been successfully working on Cardano, it is time for the blockchain to work on improving its speed and scalability, as well as bring improvements to the programming language behind these smart contracts.
That’s what the Vasil hard fork aims to do.
How Will Vasil Improve Cardano?
As stated above, the Vasil upgrade is going to be making some major updates to help with the speed and scalability of the network, and also make the programming language, Plutus, better.
Currently, there are a lot of restrictions on what you can and cannot do using Plutus. Because of these restrictions, creating complex dApps on Cardano is just not possible. With the upgrades to Plutus, developers will more easily be able to use the language to build complex, powerful, and efficient dApps using smart contracts.
As smart contracts get more efficient, the size of the data on the contract also gets smaller. With smaller data to send to the blockchain, not only will it be faster, but more transactions will be able to fit on a block further scaling the blockchain. On top of that, smaller transactions mean a smaller transaction fee.
For example, on Cardano Essential, they did a test buy of an NFT to see the difference in the transaction. Using the current version of Plutus, the transaction came out to be 6573 bytes and cost 1.685 ADA. Using a test version of the new Plutus, the same transaction was 481 bytes and cost 0.398 ADA. That’s a 92.68% and 76.4% decrease respectively.
Keep in mind, these transaction fees are only going to be different for transactions that include smart contracts. Sending ADA from one wallet to another will likely not see any cost difference.
With a higher speed and a lower cost, this will encourage a lot more development on Cardano, since currently there isn’t much. Now that developers will be able to create more complex smart contracts, we could see the rise of new decentralized apps in the Cardano ecosystem.
What to Expect With Cardano’s Vasil Hark Fork?
You as a user don’t have to do anything for this upgrade.
Keep your ADA on your wallet, and do not send it to anyone that claims they are going to do any kind of upgrades.
This upgrade will likely happen in the background and you won’t even know it’s happening.
It is possible that centralized exchanges will stop the trade of Cardano during this upgrade because they did the same thing during
Ethereum’s upgrade, The Merge.
Summary
Cardano is a blockchain that lets developers build apps using smart contracts. Cardano will soon be going through a fork, which is a split of the blockchain into a new upgraded version of Cardano.
The Vasil hard fork will be a new, improved version of Cadano’s blockchain that aims to increase the speed and scalability of smart contracts by improving the programming language that is used to build the smart contracts.
After this upgrade, more smart contracts will be able to fit onto a block since they will be smaller in size. That means faster transaction speeds and less cost per transaction. This will hopefully encourage more development in the Cardano ecosystem.
You, as a user, don’t need to do anything for this upgrade. Your ADA will be safe in your wallet, and definitely do not send it to anyone who claims they can upgrade your tokens.
Now that you know what Cardano’s Vasil hard fork is, you can learn the
best ways to stake Cardano!
