Cardano Among Top Three Actively Developed Assets as Vasil Monitoring Continues

Cardano is currently one of the top three actively developed projects for the week. This follows a successful Vasil launch and the deployment of capabilities in the last week of September.

With the Vasil upgrade now on the mainnet, IOG continues development as teams add resources to the Cardano node tests GitHub repository, per IOG's weekly report.
In the last week also, two Marlowe contracts with Babbage capabilities were executed on the mainnet: a token drop, the first Plutus V2 validator to run on the mainnet, and a token swap with the use of reference scripts.
Currently, 1,117 projects are building on Cardano, while 102 projects have been launched. Cardano native tokens stand at 6.3 million minted across 62,753 policies. Plutus scripts were at 3,392, while the total number of transactions was at 51.3 million.

Vasil monitoring continues
On Sept. 27, the new Vasil capabilities (including node and CLI support for reference inputs, inline datums and reference scripts) along with a new Plutus cost model arrived on the Cardano mainnet. This follows the successful Vasil mainnet launch on Sept. 22.

According to IOG, monitoring continues for at least four epochs after the hard fork, after which a decision about future adjustments will be made based on "regular" network bandwidth. An epoch usually lasts for five days, which implies 20 days of monitoring after the hard fork.
Some positive feedback has been reported after the hard fork. MuesliSwap, Cardano DEX reports an almost 91% slash in transaction size and also a nearly 50% decrease in fees.

The largest Cardano NFT marketplace, JPG Store, likewise reported a 50% slash in network fees after its upgrade to Plutus V2, which allowed for smaller transaction sizes.