Cardano Successfully Launches Vasil Upgrade on Testnet

Cardano (ADA) has successfully conducted a hard fork of its testnet in readiness for the upcoming Vasil upgrade. The new development promises greater scalability and performance improvements to the network.

The latest announcement was made on July 3 by Input-Output Global (IOG), the tech firm behind Cardano. IOHK (rebranded to IOG) now calls upon developers, exchanges, and stake pool operators to launch their projects on the testnet. In this way, any necessary adjustments will be noticed earlier on, before Vasil becomes a reality on the mainnet.

Cardano Implements Vasil on Testnet

Notably, the Vasil hard fork is one of the primary features of Cardano’s Basho phase. The latter is the fourth in a series of five of the network’s building eras. The previous three focused on the foundation (Byron), decentralization (Shelley), and smart contracts (Goguen), while Basho’s aim is scalability.

Once launched on the mainnet, Vasil will bring a host of scalability features. Among them are increased throughput or block creation speed and better “script performance and efficiency.” Additionally, all users will benefit from low network costs. Even more, Vasil will allow interoperability between Cardano and other blockchains.

For now, IOG says the Vasil proposal for Cardano mainnet will only be released once the community is “comfortable and ready.” The company, however, expects this to be done in the next four weeks.

Previously, IOG had scheduled the Vasil mainnet hard fork for June 29. However, the engineering team agreed to postpone the event to create time for fixing several non-severe bugs.

Growth With Smart Contracts

The previous major development for Cardano was the integration of smart contract functionality. With it came a string of DApps, including DeFi protocols. And even though the ecosystem was plagued with concurrency issues, it continues to see significant developer activity and a growing number of DApps.

According to DeFi TVL aggregator DeFi Llama, Cardano’s total value locked (TVL) is currently at $115.85 million. Decentralized exchange WingRiders is the largest contributor to this figure, holding a TVL of $49.7 million.

Despite Vasil being a big deal for Cardano, the news of its deployment on the network’s testnet has done little good to ADA’s price. At writing time, the token was trading at $0.44, down some 0.4% on the day.