Cardano Blockchain Advances With the Vasil Update

The Cardano Foundation claims that the five-day Cardano Vasil hard fork process will enhance network performance. Charles Hoskinson, a co-founder of Cardano, said it was the hardest update the team had worked on since the project’s 2017 launch.

A hard fork happens when the core code of a network is altered, necessitating the development of a brand-new blockchain. They may be contentious, but not always.

For instance, following the merge last week, the Ethereum network underwent a hard fork. It was an effort to protect Ethereum’s proof-of-work protocol, which depends on miners to validate transactions.

The Vasil hard fork, however, will make use of Cardano’s hard fork combinator technology, which introduces new features without erasing any data from the blockchain’s earlier versions, according to Cardano developer Input Output on Twitter.

When is a hard fork not a hard fork??

What differentiates #Cardano’s hard fork events from other blockchain protocols?

? These are the advantages of Cardano’s HFC technology? #VasilHardfork #CardanoVasil #Vasil pic.twitter.com/wIwaRyxU5N

— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) September 22, 2022

Reduced transaction times will be the primary advantage of the Vasil hard fork, according to Cardano Foundation CEO Frederik Gregaard, who wrote to i>Decrypt/i> in an email.

“Vasil will enhance Cardano’s smart contract capabilities through Plutus V2, which adds greater efficiency to an already powerful smart contract platform,” he said. “Ultimately, it will reduce script execution costs and transaction size, plus improve throughput.”

In other words, Cardano smart contracts will be easier to write after the September 27th completion of the Vasil hard fork and an upgrade to the Plutus scripting language. Because more of them can fit into each block—or batch of transactions—on the network, lower transaction fees are made possible.

For Cardano DeFi projects like Indigo Protocol, which has been operating its synthetic assets project on the Vasil testnet since July, it’s a significant development.

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