On September 22, 2022, 9:44 p.m. UTC, the Cardano Blockchain underwent the Vasil Hard Fork upgrade. However, some of the features will get activated on September 27. This update will result in quicker payments and cheaper costs for users. Additionally, the network’s addition of Layer 2 capability through Hydra will boost the scalability of decentralized apps.
Cardano’s long awaited Vasil Hard Fork upgrade came days after its competitor Ethereum underwent their biggest upgrade till date, Ethereum Merge, a move of its Consensus mechanism from POW to POS.
Originally the Vasil Fork upgrade was supposed to take effect in June 2022, but got delayed by 3 months. The event finally triggered on September 22, 2022. Up to twelve exchanges hold the majority of the ADA liquidity, and the upgrade went smooth with all of them.
Cardano, ADA is currently trading at $0.457, with a volume of $15,621,046,103 which makes it sit comfortably in 8th position according to CoinMarketCap.
It is down by more than 80 percent, since it reach ATH last year, before the Alonzo upgrade.
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What’s next for Cardano?
Charles Hoskinson, co founder of Cardano, has recommended the community to upgrade to far the most latest iteration of the wallet, Daedalus 5. As it contains substantial bug fixes.
Hydra Integration
In exchange for verifying transactions and defending the network against Denial-of-Service (DoS) threats, the validators get a portion of the processing costs they manage as payment.
Cardano plans to include Hydra, a Layer 2 solution that will conduct off-chain transactions, to resolve these issues. In comparison to the main network, it will charge reduced transaction fees, enabling the network to become genuinely decentralized, minimize delay, and handle more operations every second.
Cost of Transactions
Due to the savings from bypassing expenditures and establishing UTXO (Unspent Transaction Outputs), the validators will have much quicker access to earlier data that was recorded on the Blockchain. It will lower transaction costs.
Cardano is now the second quickest currency, behind XRP. And the transaction are completed within minutes on the Cardano platform. However, the block verification which confirms whether the transaction is entirely safe and irreversible, takes about 20 minutes.
Scalability Of Decentralized Applications
The Vasil improvement makes it possible for data to be readily kept on-chain. This helps with the goal of improving the link among data and blockchain. This functionality will have a significant influence on how well the Blockchain can support Plutus. Plutus its native language, and decentralized applications.
Blockchain Security
To connect with decentralized apps under the present Blockchain concept, every wallet user must provide a certain amount of collateral. Previously, the security amount was set at 15% of the processing costs. The Dapp user will lose all the funds they are transmitting through the Dapp if the validation failed. However, following the Vasil Hard Fork, they will be sent to a given digital wallet if a Dapp payment fails to work.
New Projects are Excited to Launch
Plutus 2.0 is now a new version of Cardano’s scripting language. According to the Cardano founder Hoskinson, a lot of new projects are very “excited” to deploy smart contracts following the upgrade.
Video: Cardano Vasil Fork: What’s next for ADA?
Here’s a youtube video explaining the changes:
ADA Price Prediction After Vasil Fork Event
Generally after every successful event, we get to see a dump in the price. Ada may be a no exception. We may see a short term dump in ADA’s price. However, the community is strong, and Cardano is just getting started. Long term, it is one of the safest bet alongside, BTC, ETH and some major altcoins.
Check out if ADA can reach 500 INR long term?