Input Output and Cardano foundation have together submitted a proposal to upgrade its pre-production environment to protocol v8 on Saturday, Feb. 11 at 00:00 UTC.
This upgrade is set to bring new cryptographic primitives to the Cardano ecosystem, boosting greater interoperability as well as secure cross-chain DApp development with Plutus smart contracts.
According to the announcement post, this is aimed at allowing developers to work with other blockchains in a seamless manner.
Additionally, this environment will also make it easier for the community to carry out final-stage integration and upgrade testing prior to the SECP upgrade on the mainnet on February 14, 2023.
Also known as the Valentine upgrade, it will launch on February 14 although its functionality will be accessible in the pre-production environment starting on February 11, according to a tweet by Cardano developer Input Output on February 8.
After Vasil, Valentine is the next protocol upgrade to the Cardano network that will introduce “new built-in functions to Plutus to support ECDSA and Schnorr cryptographic signatures,” which will “allow developers to use a wider range of multi-signature or threshold signature designs.”
For those new, the new built-in functions will support signatures such as ECDSA and Schnorr to provide the highest level of security for cross-chain applications.
Cardano’s Next Upgrade Employs The Same HFC Approach
According to the Input-Output post from February 8, this upgrade will be native to Cardano and ensure the highest level of security, employing the same Cardano’s hard fork combinator [HFC] approach to introduce these new cross-chain capabilities to the Cardano network.
According to Tim Harrison, vice president of community and ecosystem at Input Output, who made the announcement on January 19, the preparations for this upgrade have been ongoing across the entire ecosystem since November 2022, with intense integration testing in a preview environment.
Meanwhile, the Cardano ecosystem is teeming with a lot of activities as recently IOHK has launched its self-built fully operational public testnet of for its Ethereum [ETH] sidechain, following the release of its sidechain building toolkit.
Further, the layer-1 blockchain just executed over 5,000 smart contracts on the network and was recently placed second in its GitHub development activity. It also assumed the same position among the top smart contract cryptocurrency projects by staking market capitalization.