The Vasil hard fork is coming. Charles Hoskinson, the CEO and founder of IOG, the company behind Cardano, disclosed Friday when the long-delayed Vasil hard fork is likely to kick off. In what will be seen as good news for ADA fans, Hoskinson expects the upgrade to be executed on the mainnet next month.
Wen Vasil Upgrade?
If everything goes according to plan and all the bugs have been ironed out, the Vasil hard fork should go live in the coming weeks.
During a Friday Livestream from Colorado, Charles Hoskinson shared a brief update of the Vasil upgrade, named after Bulgarian Mathematician and Cardano proponent Vasil Dabov, who passed on recently. Hoskinson noted that things are moving along swiftly. Both developers and the community are still conducting thorough tests, with the integration work and infrastructure looking fine. Moreover, there are no major bugs, only small bugs in the backlog — none of which are hard fork blockers.
According to data from PoolTool, the Stake Pool Operators (SPOs) running the latest 1.35.3 now account for 55% of mainnet block production in the current epoch. This is more than halfway to the 75% required to activate Vasil on the Cardano mainnet.
Hoskinson estimates the upgrade will take place “sometime in September” unless the team runs into a considerable slow-down along the way. Notably, the final decision on the exact date will be made in consultation with the network’s dapp development community and developers.
“The next major lift is to get the exchanges on board. Binance is reporting that they’re currently upgrading by volume,” Hoskinson said. He added that “generally, what happens is after a hard fork date is announced, you see a big rush and people push through.”
Once the goal of 75% SPOs is hit and three to five of the major exchanges by volume have upgraded their Cardano nodes to the latest version, a hard fork date will then be scheduled “and then the rest of the exchanges will feel the urgency and they start upgrading. It’s really hard to get them otherwise — they tend to need a bit of a push for that,” Hoskinson further posted.
Will ADA Soar After Vasil Hard Fork?
The Vasil hard fork is Cardano’s most anticipated blockchain upgrade since Alonzo went live last September. It will introduce pivotal network improvements that will reduce the size of transactions, therefore boosting the network’s throughput and lowering transaction fees. Moreover, it’s also hoped that the upgrade will ameliorate the concurrency issue that has severely hampered the scalability of decentralized applications on Cardano.
As the eighth-largest cryptocurrency, Cardano’s ADA token is currently priced at $0.4425, having lost 1.01% over the past 24 hours. This comes amid a market-wide sell-off after U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell reiterated hawkish monetary policy on Friday at the central bank’s Economic Symposium. The world’s largest cryptocurrency by market cap, bitcoin, dipped below the $20,000 level Saturday.
From a fundamental perspective, the Vasil hard fork could bolster ADA adoption owing to improved network efficiency. This could, in turn, give the token strength to advance higher. Fans of the coin are eager to see it hit $1. But until Vasil is completed, ADA will probably stay in the bear territory, pressured by ongoing macro risks and their adverse effect on cryptocurrency markets.
Interestingly, the much-anticipated Ethereum Merge is also scheduled to happen at some point between September 10 and 20.
