According to the official Twitter page of Cardano operator Input Output Global Hong Kong, the first phase of the Vasil hard fork, a long-awaited upgrade to the Cardano blockchain, concluded successfully early on Friday morning. The backward-incompatible upgrade to the main network will boost smart contract capabilities, chain throughput and reduce costs.
Cardano Gets Much Needed Upgrades
The smart contract language used by Cardano is called Plutus. Vasil will release Plutus v2, the second edition of Cardano’s scripting language.
Plutus is the base layer of Cardano and is responsible for effectively separating off-chain, user-machine-run smart contract code from on-chain transaction validation. The new Plutus v2 features will be released on September 27, one epoch after Thursday’s hard fork.
Cardano is built on Bitcoin’s “unspent transaction output” (UTXO) system, which calculates what’s in users’ wallets by tracking the change left over when coins are spent.
Vasil’s updates to the Cardano ledger will make it possible to script contracts that make use of inputs and UTXOs without actually spending them. That is, enabling access to data stored on the blockchain without the traditional steps of spending and recreating UTXOs.
Previously, the size of transactions that ran reference scripts caused processing delays. This is no longer an issue, thanks to a change in how reference scripts are handled.
Upcoming Improvements
To further enhance Cardano‘s speed and scalability after Vasil, the network will implement a new technique known as “diffusion pipelining,” which involves compressing some of the idle time by propagating blocks ahead of their entire validation while still validating headers.
This scaling improvement, detailed in a blog post, would facilitate the distribution of data about newly created blocks among network users by making it possible for blocks to be propagated across the network well within five seconds after their creation.
