Cardano Insider Shares Deeper Insights Into the Vasil Upgrade

Over the weekend, Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), the Cardano blockchain development team, successfully deployed the Vasil upgrade on their testnet. The group promised the upgrade would bring significant performance and capability enhancements to the Cardano ecosystem.

As IOHK prepares for the full launch on the mainnet, in a press release, Tim Harrison, VP of Community & Ecosystem Communications at Cardano, shares deeper insights into the upgrade.

Harrison said the foundation for the Vasil upgrade was the new Cardano node version 1.35.0, which enables the use of new Plutus capabilities, including node and command-line interface support for reference inputs, inline datums, and reference scripts, collateral output, and Plutus V2 primitives.

He added that essential features going live with the upgrade are diffusion pipelining and upgrades to Plutus.

Diffusion pipelining enables higher throughput by improving block propagation times. It streamlines the process of sharing information about newly created blocks among network participants by ensuring that blocks go live within five seconds after their creation. Therefore, diffusion pipelining propagates blocks before their full validation, overlapping the time spent on diffusion with the time needed on validation.

The process also ensures that a block’s body retains the metadata in the next block, essential for resistance against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

Plutus script enhancements include the addition of reference inputs (CIP-31), inline datums (CIP-32), and implementation of reference scripts (CIP-33), all of which enable developers to create faster, more efficient decentralized applications (DApps).

The Cardano blockchain has facilitated a groundswell in DApp launches, with dozens already operating on the mainnet, including multiple decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and NFT marketplaces. Harrison said the IOG team had tracked over 1,000 projects building on the Cardano network.