On September 22, 2022, Cardano’s long-awaited Vasil update became operational. The hard fork is intended to boost Cardano’s Decentralized Apps (DApps) development potential and to increase the ecosystem’s scalability and general transaction throughput capacity from the outside.

Let’s look at the changes that the new Cardano phase will bring.

What is Hard Fork? 

The blockchain network of Cardano is a chain of blocks that is updated continuously and contains data like transaction records. It is kept secure and decentralized by validators who are compensated with rewards in ADA.

Hard fork events are held as the Cardano blockchain develops over time to assist users by updating the network by introducing new advancements to the current blockchain in the future or by divergence from the existing blockchain.

There have been several hard fork events for Cardano in the past, such as the Mary hard fork that provided native assets and allowed developers to make unique tokens on the network.

Cardano’s Vasil Hard Fork

The Vasil hard fork brought numerous improvements to network capacity, and Cardano’s smart contract programming language Plutus, which enables Cardano decentralized application (dApp) development, is named after Bulgarian mathematician Vasil Dabov, a prominent Cardano ambassador who recently passed away.

Vasil proposed to address these concerns by introducing “diffusion pipelining” to the Cardano blockchain, enhancing the Plutus smart contract language for dApp developers, significantly increasing network throughput, and lowering block transmission delay.

The Vasil hard fork’s primary goals are to enhance the Cardano network for all its users and enhance the development environment for Cardano developers that utilize Plutus to build their decentralized applications.

The Changes in Cardano Network

The remaining upgrades went into effect on September 27, 2022, even though the first phase of the hard fork began on September 22, 2022. The second stage of the hard fork will focus on redefining Plutus’ pricing structure, which directly affects the processing and memory costs necessary to control Cardano’s native smart contracts.

The team also disclosed that it had been hard at work developing its layer-2 scaling solution, the Hydra head protocol, which could process transactions off the Cardano blockchain while still using it as its primary security and settlement layer. This work is in addition to the Vasil upgrade.

Up until this point, the Cardano team’s most recent release showed that it had successfully fixed a problem with Hydra’s node framework. Currently, there is no set date for the protocol’s release. However, the IOHK team hints that the offering might enter the market as early as the first quarter of 2023 or as late as 2022.