Cardano ‘Catastrophically’ Broken? – Charles Hoskinson Refutes Claims of Vasil Upgrade Being Rushed

Charles Hoskinson, Cardano’s co-founder, has quelled concerns over reports that the upcoming Vasil hard fork was being rushed, leaving out issues that could lead to the event going wrong.

It all started when Adam Dean, a prominent Cardano ecosystem developer, tweeted on Thursday that the Cardano Testnet was “catastrophically broken” due to a bug discovered in Node version 1.35.2.

“This bug was only discovered because operators rushed to upgrade on Mainnet, and it was creating incompatible forks and causing a decrease to chain density,” Wrote Adam referring to a bug found on V 1.35.2 in July but “fixed”.

Following the detection of the bug, Cardano released a new client software, Node version 1.35.3, which is presently incapable of syncing with the previous node and is now running on two new testnets without block history. According to Adam, although the community had previously been told that the node was “Tested and Ready” for the Vasil Hardfork, the bug had not been fixed after being discovered.

“To say that this level of “rushing” gives me uneasy feelings is an understatement,” Adam added, “If there were a “nuclear clock” for Cardano we got perilously close to hitting “midnight.”

On Friday, Hoskinson discredited claims of the testnets being rushed, terming such assertions as “bizarre” and “alarmist.” “The code in question has been thoroughly tested for months by everyone, including SPOs,” Charles tweeted, adding that the code that was an issue on the testnet had been removed. 

He went on to suggest that whereas delaying the Vasil upgrade “for a few months” to retest the code was still an option for the community, he disapproved of it considering the many delays that have rocked Vasil.

Dubbed Cardano’s “most significant update,” the Vasil hardfork is set to bring significant performance and scalability improvements to the world’s largest proof-of-stake network. Despite Vasil being delayed several times, a soft date of June 29 had been proposed for the hard fork, with Hoskinson saying that he did not anticipate any further delays.

Despite news on the testnet breakage drawing significant attention in the crypto community, Input Output -Cardano’s developer arm- was yet to comment at the time of this report. Meanwhile, Cardano’s ADA token has tanked on the news, giving back roughly 12% in the past 24 hours to trade at $0.47.