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Cardano Vasil upgrade ready with all ‘critical mass indicators’ achieved

With the countdown now under 24 hours for Cardano’s most ambitious upgrade, all three metrics necessary to launch the awaited Vasil upgrade have been met.

The Cardano Vasil upgrade is set to take place in less than 24 hours on Sept. 22, with the Cardano team noting all three “critical mass indicators” needed to trigger the upgrade are now met.

A Sept. 21 update on Twitter by the company behind Cardano, Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) states within the last 48 hours 13 cryptocurrency exchanges had confirmed their readiness for the hard fork, representing over 87% of Cardano’s (ADA) liquidity.

Of the top exchanges for ADA liquidity, Coinbase is the only exchange listed as “in progress” regarding its integration status, according to an ecosystem readiness page by IOHK.

However, a recent tweet by Coinbase has already hinted it will support the fork, saying ADA transactions will be halted for maintenance “for the Cardano Vasil hard fork.”

Originally intended for a June launch, the Vasil upgrade has seen its launch day twice rescheduled, most recently due to a bug discovered in Cardano’s prior node version which created incompatibility issues.

With an updated Vasil node in place, over 98% of mainnet blocks are now being created by the updated nodes, while the blockchain's top decentralized applications (DApps) have also confirmed their readiness, marking all three metrics needed for the upgrade go-ahead. 

News of the upgrade has seen social media chatter about ADA increase by 35.16% over the past seven days from Sept. 19 according to market intelligence platform Santiment, third behind Ripple (XRP) and Ethereum (ETH).

Once live, the upgrade will be the blockchain's most significant since its Alonzo hard fork in September last year, which brought functionality for smart contracts for the first time. This upgrade aims to bring smart contract enhancements, reduced costs, and increased throughput on the network.

IOHK said one of the most significant upgrades brought by the fork is faster block creation as they can be transmitted without full validation.

Related: Cardano outranks Bitcoin in global top intimate brands in new report

The Vasil upgrade is named after the late artist Vasil Stoyanov Dabov, a Cardano community member and ambassador who passed away in December 2021 due to a pulmonary embolism.

Currently, ADA’s price sits at $0.44 as per CoinGecko, down 3.4% over 24 hours and down over 85% from its $3.09 all-time high from Sept. 2nd, 2021.

Gala Games exploiter returns $22M from GALA token attack

Cardano’s Vasil hard fork proposal submitted: Countdown commences

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.

Related: Can Cardano's July hard fork prevent ADA price from plunging 60%?

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.

Gala Games exploiter returns $22M from GALA token attack

Countdown to Cardano’s Hard Fork: Goguen Phase Smart Contracts ‘Represent a Big Step Forward’

Countdown to Cardano’s Hard Fork: Goguen Phase Smart Contracts ‘Represent a Big Step Forward’The digital currency network Cardano is two days away from the upcoming hard fork on September 12 and the community is expecting to see functional smart contracts. These can be used for decentralized finance (defi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and other types of decentralized applications (dapps). Cardano has managed to capture the third-largest crypto market capitalization […]

Gala Games exploiter returns $22M from GALA token attack