3 months after the target date Cardano has set September 22 as the date for its Vasil mainnet upgrade

The new fifth blockchain update includes improvements to the Plutus programming language and promises greater scalability for lower fees.

Blockchain founder Charles Hoskinson announced on his YouTube blog on Friday that Cardano has set September 22 as the date for the Vasil mainnet upgrade. The hard fork was originally scheduled for June this year and was changed twice.

According to Cardano-associated R&D company Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), which worked on the update, three necessary critical mass indicators have been achieved

 

“1. 75% of mainnet blocks are created by the final Vasil node candidate (1.35.3)  2. Approximately 25 exchanges upgraded (representing 80% of ada liquidity)  3. top 10 DApps by TVL confirming they have upgraded to 1.35.3 on PreProduction and are ready for mainnet.”

IOHK wrote that, of the top 12 crypto exchanges, MEXC and Bitrue are “ready” for the upgrade, while Binance is “nearly there” and Upbit, Coinbase, WhiteBit, BKEX and HitBTC are “in progress.”

Developers have promised higher scalability and lower fees from the hard fork, which will include the first major upgrade to the Plutus script — the programming language used for smart contracts on the Cardano blockchain. Plutus was announced in the previous upgrade, named Alonzo, which took place in September of last year.

“If we’ve all done our job right, we will wake up on Sept. 22, and it will be just another day,” Hoskinson said on his YouTube vlog. Later he added:

“We started and knew that, over time, we could get to what Ethereum has done, but we understood a road map to get there. […] There’s a lot of things on the horizon, especially in 2023.”

The fork is named in honor of Vasil Dabov, a Bulgarian member of the Cardano community who died in 2021. Cardano’s ADA is priced at $0.454 on Friday, up 0.98% over the last week.