By Darren Parkin
Charles Hoskinson this evening revealed the date for Cardano’s much-anticipated Vasil update later this month.
Speaking from Colorado, the InputOutput Group chief explained the official mainnet upgrade will fall on a significant date in honour of the man it is named after.
“We looked at the rate of progress with the SPOs and the exchanges and we now have an official date for the Vasil hard fork – September 22,” declared Hoskinson.
“What’s amazing about that date, randomly, is it just so happens to fall on the independence day of Bulgaria.”
The doff of the cap to Bulgaria is in honour of the late Vasil Dabov – a Bulgarian mathematician and long-time friend of Charles Hoskinson and many of the Cardano team.
“He was a good friend of our ecosystem – he spent a good part of his life planting 10,000 trees,” added the Cardano creator.
“We decided to honour him, and it’s just random luck that it fell on the anniversary of Bulgarian independence – how about that?”
Thanking the senior team and developers, the 34-year-old also praised the Cardano community for its “persistence, patience and dogged loyalty”.
The move is regarded as the blockchain’s most significant update since introducing smart contracts two years ago. Vasil was implemented on the Cardano testnet for final integration testing prior to full deployment. It is part of the ‘Basho’ phase of the Cardano roadmap, which is focused on optimising and scaling Cardano to better support DeFi applications and facilitate Cardano’s growth and adoption. It delivers increased network capacity, richer applications, improved interoperability and faster transactions.
The Vasil upgrade will also bring important scalability improvements, allowing the network to be optimised as it grows. This is a significant upgrade given the rapid growth of Cardano, which currently has more than five million native tokens created on the platform, with over 1,000 projects building on it. A key scalability-focused element of the upgrade will be the introduction of ‘diffusion pipelining’, which will allow for continued network tuning and optimisation, including an increase in block size.
Vasil will also implement upgrades to Plutus – Cardano’s core smart contract programming language – which will enable developers to create more powerful, more efficient blockchain-based applications (dApps). These improvements will reduce costs, simplify scripts and provide new cryptographical and other primitives. The upgrade will also add initial core support for SECP256k1 cryptographic verification, thus improving interoperability options with Ethereum and Bitcoin.
The Vasil upgrade, developers say, will take place with almost no disruption to daily Cardano users due to Input Output Global Inc. (IOG), the research and software development company behind Cardano, creating a ‘hard fork combinator’, which means that the chain continues through the upgrade without a break in service.
Tim Harrison, Vice President of Community & Ecosystem at Input Output Global, recently hailed the Vasil upgrade as a testament to the hard work of both the development team and the Cardano community.
“The growth of the network has been significant over the past two years, and we’ve seen an explosion of growth in the ecosystem over the past nine months,” he said.
“The Vasil upgrade will allow the network to continue to scale and grow, plus open up new options for developers, ensuring we meet the needs of the community as we go forward. So it seemed only right to name it in honour of Vasil Dabov – a Cardano ambassador who recently passed away, leaving a remarkable legacy with over 10,000 trees planted in his lifetime.”
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