Cardano (ADA) is currently the eighth largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, with a supply cap of 45 billion coins. It is a peer-to-peer, proof of stake Blockchain developed by Charles Hoskinson, who is also one of the co-founders of the Ethereum Blockchain.
Last week, Hoskinson tweeted about the progress of the Vasil Hard Fork upgrade. The Vasil Hard Fork upgrade is expected to improve network performance and Cardano’s Plutus smart contract programming language, which enables the creation of decentralized applications (dApps).
WHAT IS VASIL HARD FORK?
A Hard Fork is a radical change to a network’s protocol and creates a permanent deviation from the previous version of Blockchain. Miners must choose which Blockchain to continue verifying. Previously, Bitcoin Cash was created by creating a Hard Fork on the Bitcoin Blockchain. The Cardano community has been waiting for Vasil’s upgrade, as it was expected to be in July earlier.
The upgrade is expected to bring in a number of changes in terms of transaction fees, the scalability of the decentralized app, as well as in the transaction speed.
Transaction fees: The new development will bring significant network improvements that will shrink transaction sizes, thereby increasing network throughput, which will result in cut transaction fees. Currently, ADA’s average transaction fees are $0.15 as of August 28, 2022, according to the data on Messari.io. Cardano offers the lowest transaction fees after the XRP token.
Decentralized Application (dApp) Scalability: The upgrade is expected to address the current concurrency issue that has severely hindered the capacity of Cardano’s decentralized applications to scale. Currently, Cardano hosts 1,075 dApps on its platform according to Cardano.
Transaction speed: Vasil will allow developers to store and reference information without having to use output. This will optimize the transaction throughput and increase the concurrency of Blockchain. It will also significantly increase the speed of transactions. Current transaction time is around 20 seconds.
DIVIDEND UPGRADE STATUS
As of now, three crypto exchanges have upgraded to the Vasil Hard Fork, while 22 exchanges are still in the process of upgrading. These include Binance and crypto.com.
Hoskinson said in the tweet that “The next big promise is getting the exchanges on board. Binance reports that they are currently upgrading by volume.”
“Generally, what happens is after a Hard Fork date is announced, you see a huge rush and people push through,” he further said in the tweet.
