Fork of July: Cardano Vasil upgrade successfully launches on testnet

July 4, 2022 Coin Telegraph

With the Cardano testnet hard fork complete, all that remains is to fork the mainnet, which will come in about four weeks, or when developers have had enough time to prepare their tools for the upgrade.

The much-anticipated Vasil hard fork has been completed on the Cardno testnet, bringing it one major step closer to becoming a reality on the mainnet and promising broad performance upgrades.

Project developers, stake pool operators (SPO), and exchanges are now encouraged to deploy their work on the testnet to ensure integrations run smoothly when the mainnet gets the Vasil treatment in about four weeks.

We’re happy to report that today at 20:20 UTC the IOG team has successfully hard forked the #Cardano Testnet. This is an important next step in the journey towards the Vasil upgrade on mainnet.

1/10 pic.twitter.com/9F9vzec0pK
— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) July 3, 2022

Once completed on the mainnet, the Vasil hard fork will allow faster block creation and greater scalability for decentralized apps (dapps) running on Cardano. Input Output HK (IOHK), the organization that produced Cardano, said in a July 3 tweet that in addition to the performance upgrades, developers would benefit from “much-improved script performance and efficiency” and lower costs.

Vasil will also enable interoperability between Cardano (ADA) sidechains, one of the main features developers intend to launch in the current Basho phase of the blockchain’s development. Basho is the fourth development phase for Cardano that focuses on scaling and will be followed up with the Voltaire phase, in which governance will be the main focus.

The Vasil upgrade is now live on testnet, coming to mainnet in a few weeks. Expect Cardano DeFi to go into the rapids from here
— ADA whale (@cardano_whale) July 3, 2022

IOHK also noted that there would not be a proposal to hard fork the mainnet until “ecosystem partners are comfortable and ready,” but it is expected to come in about four weeks.

The previous phase, Goguen, saw the launch of smart contract capabilities on Cardano, which decentralized finance (DeFi) developers took advantage of by launching dozens of dapp exchanges and DeFi protocols according to ecosystem tracker Cardano Cube.

Cardano’s top dapp with $49.7 million in total value locked (TVL) is currently the decentralized exchange (DEX) WingRiders, according to DeFi data compiler DeFi Llama.

The testnet hard fork has done little to move ADA as it is only up 0.1% over the last 24 hours to $0.45, according to CoinGecko.

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.

Cardano (ADA) Founder Charles Hoskinson Addresses Congress, Argues for Real-World Uses of Crypto and Blockchain

June 26, 2022 The Daily Hodl

Cardano Creator Charles Hoskinson Says Terra (LUNA) Collapse Contributed To Delay in Major ADA Upgrade

June 23, 2022 The Daily Hodl

‘Disappointing’: Cardano devs delay Vasil hard fork by a month

June 22, 2022 Coin Telegraph

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While IOHK admitted the news was disappointing, the firm stated it is taking an “abundance of caution” to ensure the Vasil upgrade is implemented correctly.

Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), the blockchain engineering firm behind the Cardano network has released some “disappointing news”, announcing a one-month delay to the long-awaited Vasil upgrade.

The Vasil upgrade is set to provide a “massive performance improvement to Cardano” and its smart contract capabilities according to Cardano co-founder Charles Hoskinson. It was previously slated to go through on June 29, however the latest estimate is now set for the last week of July.

IOHK’s head of delivery and project Nigel Hemsley noted in a June 20 blog post that the core Input Output Global (IOG) team working on the upgrade “is extremely close to finalizing the core work” but there are still seven bugs that remain outstanding and require work. None of them are categorized as “severe," he added.

“The work on Vasil has been the most complex program of development and integration to date, from several angles. It's a challenging process that requires not only significant work from core teams, but also close coordination across the ecosystem,” Hemsley wrote.

As a result, the Cardano Foundation — the non-profit that oversees the development of Cardano — and the IOG team agreed to defer sending the Vasil hard fork to the Cardano testnet from June 20 until June 29.

Once the testnet has been hard forked, devs from Cardanao-based decentralized apps (dApps) and stake pool operators SPOs will have roughly four weeks “to carry out any required integration and testing work” before the Vasil hard fork is initiated on the mainnet in late July:

“This is only reasonable and should not be rushed. The working assumption should therefore now be a Cardano mainnet hard fork occurring during the last week of July.”

“We recognize that this news will be disappointing to some. However, we are taking an abundance of caution to ensure that we do this deployment correctly,” Hemsley added.

The Vasil hard fork is the biggest upgrade to Cardano since the Alonzo hardfork from September which finally enabled smart contracts on the network. This latest upgrade is set to introduce four network improvements dubbed “CIP31, CIP32, CIP33, and CIP40.”

In theory, these upgrades are designed to reduce the size of transactions, therefore increasing the network’s throughput and lowering transaction fees on the network.

Cardano is a proof-of-stake blockchain platform aiming to provide competition to Ethereum as a smart contract network with lower fees. It is currently ranked seventh out of all crypto assets in terms of market cap at around $16 billion.

New Cardano (ADA) Upgrade Enhances Performance and Scalability As Demand Increases: IOHK

April 27, 2022 The Daily Hodl

Cardano price risks 30% drop in Q2 despite a ‘major’ hard fork ahead

April 15, 2022 Coin Telegraph

ADA price

Cardano network growth has done little to help ADA price shake its multi-month slump.

Cardano (ADA) price risks undergoing a severe correction in the next few months despite touting its blockchain network's bolstering growth and a "major" hard fork event in June.

Descending channel hints at ADA selloff ahead

ADA, which makes up about 1.75% of the total crypto market capitalization, has been trending lower since September 2021, inside a "descending channel" pattern that has successfully capped its multiple upside attempts, as illustrated in the chart below.

*ADA/USD daily price chart featuring descending channel setup. Source: TradingView*

The channel showed further strength as ADA broke above its upper trendline on March 27, only to reverse entirely in later sessions, showing a lack of conviction among the Cardano bulls.

ADA's 200-day exponential moving average (200-day EMA; the blue wave), alongside the 0.236 Fib line (near $1.29) of the Fibonacci retracement graph, drawn from $2.96-swing high to $0.78-swing low, further aided the bearish bias.

As of April 15, ADA's price consolidates inside the $0.97-$0.92 range, signaling intentions to continue its pullback from its fakeout top near $1.25.

If the descending channel setup continues panning out, ADA/USD could fall to its previous bottom range near $0.78 while eyeing the channel's lower trendline around $0.65 as its primary downside target.

*ADA/USD daily price chart. Source: TradingView*

That amounts to an almost 30% drop from today's price.

Cardano network growth fails to impress traders

Meanwhile, Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), the research and development firm behind the Cardano project, has announced incredible network growth entering April 2022.

Stablecoins, sidechains, NFTs & partnerships, launchpads & project launches, converter bridges...getting overwhelmed with all the news from the #Cardano universe?

We've gathered a structured recap of the key updates over the last 10 days.

Here's what's happening
$ADA
— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) April 12, 2022

IOHK also appears to be readying the "Vasil" hard fork, a network upgrade to make Cardano's blockchain more scalable, sometime in June.

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson stressed the word "major" five times when describing the fork's importance to the overall network growth in a video released April 12, a day after ADA crashed more than 10%.

Yes, ADA's price recovered after Hoskinson's address and IOHK's tweets. But the rebound lost momentum and is trending sideways, remaining under the influence of macro factors.

*The daily correlation coefficient between ADA/USD and NDX. Source: TradingView*

Notably, like Bitcoin, ADA's correlation with the Nasdaq-100 (NDX) rose to a record level, hitting 0.97 on April 15 versus.0.79 at the beginning of the year.

In other words, ADA price is currently in lockstep with the tech-heavy index, which has erased more than $1 trillion from its market cap in April.

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