The crucial Cardano upgrades are coming now
In a recent video, crypto expert and YouTuber Lark Davis looks at the highly anticipated Vasil hard fork and the Hydra scaling protocol that is set to follow shortly thereafter. He explains why both are crucial for the future of Cardano. The long-awaited Vasil upgrade has been in testing for a few days.
The upgrade was expected for the end of June, but the developers discovered some bugs at the last minute, which led to the last, short delay. Assuming test operations go well, Vasil could be implemented on the mainnet and go live as early as late July or early August.
Why is the Vasil hard fork a game changer?
The Vasil hard fork will introduce several improvements to Cardano. It will reduce the blockchain burden while still improving data usage as it increases transaction throughput. This improvement is critical to Cardano’s success. It will finally allow applications to solve the so-called “one transaction per block problem”. This problem has been a huge obstacle to launching applications on the Cardano blockchain.
It also makes Cardano much more resilient to DDOS attacks. The upgrade is likely to spark a wave of new adoption for Cardano, particularly towards DeFi, gaming, and NFTs. It also optimizes the smart contracts on Cardano and the blockchain will be faster – in short, there will be an overall greatly improved customer experience.
When the test network is then transferred to the main network, “normal” customers can finally enjoy the treatment-related updates.
Nevertheless, Lark Davis urges Cardano to take all the necessary time, as billions of customer dollars are at stake. Failure is not an option; it would be tantamount to doom.
Scaling the Cardano blockchain
Davis says the Vasil hard fork is just one piece of the puzzle. What comes right after the Vasil hard fork is the Hydra scaling upgrade. Hydra enables any staking pool operator to act as a scaling agent. That would allow for an incredible 1,000 transactions per second per staking pool.
That’s an extremely large scale considering there are nearly 3,200 staking pools currently in operation. If Cardano can do this, it will be the blockchain with the highest, or at least one of the highest, transaction throughputs.
The Vasil hard fork and the Hydra upgrade that followed immediately afterwards will be a quantum leap for Cardano – a term that is justified here for once, because the optimized use of the existing energy level is the key to all improvements. Another upgrade called Mithril is planned for September and should speed up wallet synchronizations, which in turn should benefit data throughput on the chain.
Disturbing statistics
According to data analysis by Santiment, Cardano has had the highest developer activity of any blockchain network over the past 30 days, but Santiment also noted that address activity has dropped.
However, Davis explained that the reason for the lack of activity is the current state of the Cardano blockchain, and that is what the upcoming upgrades will improve.
Cardano currently ranks 28th in the defi sector with just over $100 million TVL. That’s a low amount for a top 10 cryptocurrency, for example compared to Solana. Solana has $2.7 billion TVL. in DeFi. This is surprising because Solana has a lower market cap than Cardano.
But the game changer is now knocking on the door.
