Jamie McNeill
According to Input Output (IOG), Vasil hard fork upgrade for Cardano is now scheduled to take place on the 22nd September.
A major upgrade for Cardano
The Cardano community, founded by Charles Hoskinson, prides itself on the fact that the blockchain is subject to more peer reviews and testing than other blockchains.
This means some of the most academically-inclined cryptographers in the world work together to try and improve upon Cardano as much as they possibly can.
Hoskinson had stated several times that the ultimate mission of Cardano is to solve many of the problems that blockchains have today.
The goal of the hard fork is to make Cardano far more scalable than it is today, and to significantly reduce transaction costs.
The upgrade had several delays
The hard fork was initially schedule for September, but thanks to a myriad of delays (not uncommon with a project that has such a rigorous ethos of testing) it was pushed back until September.
Cardano have been known to make delays in the past, but it ultimately doesn’t appear to have had too much of a negative bearing on price of ADA, which remains the seventh largest cryptocurrency by market cap.
Are hard forks good for blockchains?
There has been a lot of debate over the past few years as to whether or not forks, particularly hard forks, are good for blockchains.
The Bitcoin community is largely opposed to making changes of any kind and values the sanctity of a blockchain that does not change, or changes very little.
In the past there have been forks in Bitcoin, although the most contentious hard forks, such as the debate over whether or not to increase the block size limit, are rarely successful.
Bitcoin’s previous forks, including Segwit and Taproot, were both soft forks and were not largely contentious.
However, Bitcoin is a very different blockchain to Cardano.
Turing complete blockchains, whose value is derived more from the smart contracts and applications that can be built on top of them rather than putting all efforts into immutability and consistency, often do soft forks and hard forks.
Ethereum has had several hard forks in the past. The most famous hard fork that Ethereum has had thus far would undoubtedly be after The DAO hack, after which point the chain forked into what is now Ethereum, and the old chain remained as Ethereum Classic.
Hard forks aren’t backwards compatible, and this can be problematic for the sanctity of a blockchain. However, in the majority of cases they can be done quite safely (given enough testing) and are not usually problematic further than the reputation damage.
It is also worth noting that different “tribes” of crypto communities have very different attitudes to hard forks.
Only last week, Monero enacted a hard fork which greatly increased anonymity on the blockchain by increasing size of ring signatures on each transaction.
Cardano speculators are excited about ADA
Those who speculate on ADA are extremely excited about the hard fork.
To add to the drama in September, Cardano’s upgrade comes at the same time as Ethereum prepares to move to proof of stake and Mt. Gox start to make repayments to creditors.
Unlike the upcoming Ethereum merge, Cardano’s upgrade hopes to greatly increase the scalability of transaction output on the blockchain. The merge, despite a lot of widely held misunderstandings, will not greatly improve Ethereum’s output, and transaction costs are likely to remain comparatively high.
Relevant news:
- Ledger Hardware Wallet Expands Support for 100 Cardano Native Tokens
- Cardano Vasil Hard Fork is Set to Go Live on September 22
- Cardano Crypto Price Prediction 2022 – Will ADA Reach $1?
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This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jamie McNeill.
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