IOHK Confirms Cardano Block Size Increase to Assist Smart Contracts

Cardano is taking its next steps to work on improving its smart contracts and transaction throughput.

Cardano’s Basho upgrade, outlined by co-founder Charles Hoskinson in a video blog earlier this year, is in full swing. One of the announced changes was an increase in block size from 72KB to 80 KB, which will take place on Feb 4, 2022. Input-Output Hong Kong made that announcement this week on Twitter, also saying that there would be memory improvements rolled out for Plutus, Cardano’s smart contract scripting language.

Both these improvements are part of Cardano’s scaling ambitions. IOHK wants to provide additional resources to provide a better experience for decentralized app users. The firm claims that the network is designed to manage high loads competently and will be closely observed for at least five days after new changes are made but also warned of peak loads during anticipated app launches and significant NFT drops.

Transaction throughput improvement is key

What does the larger block size mean? In a nutshell, it means more data capacity for a single block on a blockchain. This theoretically allows more transactions to be added to a single block, increasing transaction throughput. The Cardano blockchain recently experienced high congestion from its NFT marketplace, jpg.store.

Transactions were failing due to a peak load of over 92%. SundaeSwap was the first dApp to launch on the Cardano blockchain. It, too, experienced teething problems where users could not do token swaps due to network congestion. The issue was subsequently resolved, according to the CEO of SundaeSwap, Mateen Motawaf.

SundaeSwap currently has over $68M in total value locked.

Other notable upgrades to Cardano included in the Basho scaling plan are improvements in Unspent Transaction Output handling, stake distribution, and live stake distribution. There are also off-chain improvements in the works, including the introduction of sidechains. A sidechain is a blockchain connected to the main blockchain via a bridge to enable tokens from one chain to be used in another and returned to the main chain.

Products built on Cardano using smart contracts

Cardano’s dApps are audited for integrity to alleviate fears around unscrupulous parties. Other dApps in the works include MinSwap and ADALend, which is a Cardano-based lending solution looking to provide dApps with a flexible layer-two, much like Ethereum’s layer-two solutions.

The Alonzo hard fork was a watershed moment for Cardano. It was the occasion of the Plutus smart contract platform, which paved the way for NFTs, dApps, and DeFi on the network.