Ethereum testnet successfully forks in Shanghai upgrade rehearsal

February 28, 2023 Coin Telegraph

As Ethereum’s Shanghai upgrade approaches next month, the network’s Sepolia testnet has successfully upgraded, simulating the scheduled hard fork.

The Ethereum blockchain’s Sepolia testnet has undergone a successful upgrade that simulates the upcoming Shanghai hard fork expected to take place on mainnet in March.

The “Shapella” upgrade, which combines the names of the upcoming Shanghai and Capella hard forks, was successfully implemented on the testnet on Feb. 28.

Sepolia testnet has successfully upgraded to Shapella!

Some of the Prsym validators are offline due to the old geth version. They will come online in the next 10 mins!

Next stop: Goerli pic.twitter.com/pb43Gq7w9C
— terence.eth (@terencechain) February 28, 2023

Shanghai is the fork’s name on the execution layer client side and Capella is the upgrade name on the consensus layer client side. One of the major changes enables validators to withdraw their staked Ether (stETH) from the Beacon Chain back to the execution layer.

Validators needed to stake 32 Ether (ETH) to validate on the Ethereum blockchain. They will now be able to withdraw rewards in excess of 32 ETH and be permitted to keep validating while those who wish to fully withdraw can take all 32 ETH plus rewards and cease validating.

The next step before the Shanghai fork goes live on the mainnet will be to release the upgrade on the Ethereum Goerli testnet, which is expected to commence in March.

Fork, yeah! Cardano Vasil upgrade goes live

September 23, 2022 Coin Telegraph

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Cardano’s newest hard fork is the blockchain's most significant update since adding smart contract functionality in September.

After several months of delays, the Cardano Vasil upgrade and hard fork has finally gone live as of Thursday at 9:44 pm UTC, bringing “significant performance and capability” enhancements to the blockchain.

The success of the Cardano mainnet hard fork was announced by blockchain company Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) on Twitter on Thursday, while others also observed the hard fork tick over in a live Twitter Spaces with Cardano co-founder Charles Hoskinson.

#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 a HFC event, thus deploying new #Vasil features to the chain.
1/5
— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) September 22, 2022

IOHK previously stated the significant upgrades brought by the fork is block transmission without full validation, allowing for faster block creation. Upgrades to its Plutus smart contracts for increased efficiency also allow decentralized applications to deploy and run at lower costs.

Better buy some mouthwash. Vasil is live. Anyone have recommendations for Greg :) https://t.co/RTehxad97Z
— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) September 22, 2022

New capabilities brought by the Plutus script upgrades will become available for developers on the mainnet on Sept. 27, after one epoch which currently lasts around five days.

Bill Barhydt, founder of crypto trading platform Abra called the upgrade a “big win for developers” with decentralized finance platform Genius Yield tweeting it was “one of the most complex and consequential updates to the Cardano network ever done.”

Congrats to Cardano ($ADA) team on Vasil hardfork. More hard work in crypto paying off.

Making UTXO's and inputs accessible to scripts/Plutus without spending them is a big win for developers. Well done!

Congrats @IOHK_Charles @CardanoStiftung and teams!
— Bill Barhydt (@billbarhydt) September 22, 2022

The date for the upgrade was announced in early September by IOHK, while the “critical mass indicators” needed to trigger the hard fork were reached in the 24 hours leading up to the event.

It comes after months of delays and reschedules, with the launch day originally slated for June, it was twice delayed due to issues on the testnet caused by bugs in a prior node version creating compatibility issues.

Following the Vasil upgrade, Cardano is continuing to develop it’s layer-2 scaling solution, the Hydra head protocol, which processes transactions off the Cardano blockchain whilst still using it as the security and settlement layer.

The latest update on Hydra from Sept. 16 detailed the team addressed a known issue with the Hydra nodes. The protocol has no set launch date, but it's intended for sometime in late 2022 or the first quarter of 2023.

The announcement of the successful launch sent the price of Cardano’s coin ADA upwards by nearly 4% over the last 24 hours to $0.46 according to CoinGecko data, although it is still down over 4.5% on the week.

Cardano’s Vasil hard fork proposal submitted: Countdown commences

June 30, 2022 Coin Telegraph

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From July 3 the four-week window for application developers and exchanges to test the upcoming Cardano upgrade begins before it's launched onto the mainnet.

Cardano (ADA) blockchain developer Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) has submitted an update proposal to hard fork the Cardano testnet, kicking off the countdown for the network's Vasil mainnet upgrade.

The Vasil upgrade is slated to bring “significant performance and capability upgrades” to the blockchain, with IOHK describing the fork as the “biggest and best upgrade to date” providing a higher throughput, improved script performance for developers and lower costs.

One of the most significant updates pointed out by the team is the implementation of diffusion pipelining aimed at improving the blockchains' scalability for decentralized applications (DApps).

The update will allow faster block creation as they can be transmitted without full validation.

If everything goes smoothly, the upgrade to the testnet will take place July 3, with the mainnet upgrade scheduled for roughly around the end of July. The Cardano community requested four weeks minimum to allow time to test and upgrade applications on the testnet, and IOHK says the hard fork for the mainnet will take place “once everyone is comfortable and ready.”

The Cardano mainnet upgrade was previously supposed to take place on June 29 but was delayed by a month on June 22 citing several outstanding bugs. IOHK has called the project the “most complex program of work we’ve undertaken”.

IOHK’s “prime concern” is ensuring the upgrade is managed in a “safe and secure” manner. It reports the Vasil node is creating over 75% of the testnet network’s blocks and believes there is “good chain density to proceed safely.”

The last significant upgrade to the blockchain was in September 2021 with the Alonzo hard fork which brought in long-awaited smart contract functionality for the first time using Plutus scripts, a smart contract development language purpose built for Cardano.

The upgrade was widely considered to be a disappointment as Cardano still only has 11 DApps according to DeFi Llama. The co-founder of Cardano, Charles Hoskinson previously predicted there would be “thousands of DApps” on Cardano by 2021 and believes developers are waiting for the Vasil upgrade to launch their projects.

The Vasil node is named in honor of Vasil Stoyanov Dabov, an artist and Cardano community member and ambassador who passed away in December 2021 after a diagnosis of pulmonary embolism.

Cardano is a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain and touted as a so-called “Ethereum Killer” which aims to beat Ethereum (ETH) by providing better scalability, transactions per second and lower fees.

Currently, its native coin ADA sits in eighth position with a $15.7 billion market capitalization at a price of around $0.45, down 85% from its all-time-high of over $3 in September 2021 according to data from CoinGecko.

Terra Launches New Chain Airdropping LUNA 2.0 Coins — Token Value Slides Over 70% From Price High

May 28, 2022 Bitcoin.com

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