July Fork: Cardano Vasil Upgrade Successfully Launched on Testnet

The much-anticipated Vasil hard fork has been finalized on the Cardano testnet, bringing it one giant step closer to becoming a reality on mainnet and promising performance upgrades.

Project developers, staking pool operators (SPOs), and exchanges are now encouraged to deploy their work on testnets to ensure smooth integration on mainnet in about four weeks.

Once finalized on mainnet, the Vasil hard fork will allow for faster block creation and greater scalability for decentralized applications (DApps) running on Cardano. In a tweet on Sunday, Input Output HK (IOHK), the organization behind Cardano, said that in addition to the performance upgrade, developers will benefit from "greatly improved scripting performance and efficiency" and lower costs.

Vasil will also enable interoperability between Cardano sidechains, which is one of the main features the developers intend to roll out in the current Basho phase of blockchain development. Basho is the fourth development phase of Cardano focused on scaling, and will be followed by the Voltaire phase, where governance will be the main focus.

IOHK also noted that there will be no proposed hard fork to the mainnet until “ecosystem partners feel comfortable and ready,” but the rollout is expected to take place in about 4 weeks.

According to Cardano Cube, in the previous phase, Goguen launched smart contract functionality on Cardano, and decentralized finance (DeFi) developers took advantage of this, launching dozens of decentralized exchanges (DEX) and DeFi protocol.

According to DefiLlama, Cardano’s top DApp with a total value locked (TVL) of $49.7 million is currently DEX WingRiders.

The testnet hard fork did little to boost Cardano (ADA), as it was only up 0.1% to $0.45 over the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko.