While acknowledging the news was disappointing, IOHK stated it is taking an “abundance of caution” to ensure the Vasil upgrade is implemented correctly.
Input-Output Hong Kong (IOHK), the blockchain engineering firm behind the Cardano network has released some “disappointing news”, announcing a month-long delay in the long-awaited Vasil upgrade.
According to Cardano co-founder Charles Hoskinson, the Vasil upgrade is set to be a “massive performance improvement to Cardano” and enable its smart contracting capabilities. It was originally scheduled to go through June 29, but the latest estimate is now set for the last week of July.
Nigel Hemsley, IOHK’s head of delivery and project, noted in a June 20 blog post that the Core Input-Output Global (IOG) team is working on the upgrade and” is extremely close to finalizing the core work” but there are still seven bugs that remain outstanding and require some work. Not classified as “severe”, he added.
Hemsley further said, “The work on Vasil has been the most complex program of development and integration to date, from several angles. It’s a challenging process that requires not only significant work from core teams but also close coordination across the ecosystem.”
As a result, the Cardano Foundation — a nonprofit that oversees Cardano’s development — and the IOG team agreed to postpone sending Vasil Hard Fork to the Cardano Testnet from June 20 to June 29.
Once the testnet has been hard forked, devs from Cardanao-based decentralized apps (dApps) and stake pool operators SPOs will have about four weeks “to carry out any required integration and testing work” before launching the Vasil hard fork on the mainnet toward the end of July:
“This is only reasonable and should not be rushed. The working assumption should therefore now be a Cardano mainnet hard fork occurring during the last week of July.”
“We recognize that this news will be disappointing to some”. Hemsley added,” however, we are taking an abundance of caution to ensure that we do this deployment correctly”.
The Vasil hard fork is the biggest upgrade to Cardano since the Alonzo hard fork from September has finally enabled smart contracts on the network. This latest upgrade is set to introduce four network enhancements called, “CIP31, CIP32, CIP33, and CIP40.”
theoretically, these upgrades are designed to reduce the transaction size, thus increasing the network’s throughput and lowering transaction fees on the network.
Cardano is a proof-of-stake blockchain platform that aims to provide competition to Ethereum as a smart contract network with lower fees. It currently ranked seventh out of all crypto assets in terms of market cap at around $16 billion.
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