ADA Sees Boost In Market Share Even As Hotly Anticipated Cardano Vasil Hard Fork Is Deferred

IOG, the lead development company behind Cardano (ADA), has confirmed that the implementation of the Vasil hard fork has been delayed to allow more time for testing and fixing some bugs.

Cardano Developers Delay Vasil Upgrade

The upgrade that would take the Cardano network to the new “Basho” era has been rescheduled.

ADA is the native token of Cardano, the public and decentralized proof-of-stake blockchain that offers stiff competition to Ethereum. The so-called Vasil hard fork event to make Cardano’s blockchain more scalable was tentatively slated for June 29.

But in a June 20 blog post, IOG’s head of delivery and products, Nigel Hemsley, stated that the network upgrade “should not be rushed”.

“The IOG engineering team is extremely close to finalizing the core work, with just seven bugs still outstanding to complete the hard fork work, with none currently ranked as ‘severe’”, Hemsley said. “After some consideration, we have agreed NOT to send the hard fork update proposal to the testnet today to allow more time for testing,” he added.

The developers want to ensure that everything is working as expected before roll-out, indicating that quality and security are vital. Per the updated schedule, IOG and the Cardano Foundation are planning to hard fork the testnet at the end of June.

Once this is done, cryptocurrency exchanges, stake pool operators, and other ecosystem participants will have approximately four weeks to integrate and test the new update. At least 80% of the trading platforms must be compliant before the hard fork goes live on the Cardano mainnet in the last week of July. “This puts us behind schedule on our previously communicated target date of June 29 for a mainnet hard fork,” Hemsley opined.

IOG emphasized that no timelines can be “absolute”, especially in software development. 

The Vasil hard fork, named after Bulgarian mathematician Vasil Dabov, aims to introduce four important network improvements that together increase the network’s throughput and cut transaction fees. It’s also expected to solve the concurrency issue that has markedly strained the scalability of decentralized finance applications on the Cardano chain.

“The work on Vasil has been the most complex program of development and integration to date, from several angles,” IOG said in the announcement, explaining that launching the hard fork will require substantial coordination across the entire ecosystem.

The price of ADA has remained largely unaffected by the postponement news. The token is hovering around $0.5 at press time, a sheer 1.01% increase on the day as its market valuation rallies north of $17 billion.