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This is the latest deployment in the Basho phase of Cardano’s development and will act as a dry run before the hard fork. The Vasil testnet will enable developers, SPOs, and exchanges to test and run various integrations for the next four weeks. This will ensure that all the loopholes are properly sealed to ensure that the upgrade process is facilitated safely before pressing the upgrade switch.
“Once developers and SPOs are comfortable and ready (and the lion’s share of exchanges have completed testing and updated), the Vasil hard fork can occur.” Tim Harrison, Vice President of Community and Ecosystem at IOHK wrote in a blog on Monday.
The latest move comes after developers submitted an updated proposal to hard fork the Cardano testnet on June 29. The Vasil upgrade is expected to implement a wide range of features that will increase the performance and interoperability of Cardano. Most importantly, the upgrade will improve the already potent Plutus platform, enabling developers to create faster, more efficient DApps.
It shall also introduce “diffusion pipelining” a feature that seeks to improve block propagation times. As ZyCrypto reported, pipelining has particularly been a magnet to dApp developers as it will bring significant performance and improved throughput to Cardano and low costs.
 
 
The Vasil upgrade will also introduce a number of new cryptographic script improvements aimed at stepping up Cardano’s communication capabilities with other blockchains.
Whereas progress to the Vasil upgrade has been slow, the IOHK team has previously defended the incessant delays. In Monday’s blog, the team noted that the Vasil project has been “a complex program of work,” noting that the mainnet upgrade will occur once everyone is comfortable and ready.
The team also stated that their “prime concern” is ensuring that the upgrade “is facilitated in a safe and secure manner.” With the latest progress, the mainnet upgrade could thus take place at the end of July or early August.
Meanwhile, Cardano’s ADA surged by over 4% on Monday on the news and as of writing, the cryptocurrency is trading at $0.46 according to data from CoinMarketcap. Impressive as it may look, however, ADA is still 84.75% lower than its all-time high of $3. Cardano is currently the seventh-largest crypto asset with a market capitalization of $15.8 billion.
However, despite this drawdown, as per a recent report by the Finders panel of Fintech specialists, ADA is expected to more than triple its current price, closing at or above $2.79 by the end of 2022.
Vanessa Harris, the Chief product officer at Permission and also a member of the panel believes that ADA could outshine the panel’s 2022 predictions, hitting $3. To her, apart from the ongoing surge in the global adoption of cryptocurrencies, ADA’s unique use cases place it in a better position to grow.
“It is one of the few smart contract platforms that have placed security, correctness, and decentralization at their core, backed by formal methods and peer-reviewed research,” Harris has recently said. “While this means Cardano moves more deliberately in the short term, long term this resilience should support adoption by nation-states and non-governmental organizations.”
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