The Cardano’s Vasil Upgrade is now live on the testnet, IOG noted while calling on stake pool operators [SPO] developers and exchanges to commence their final testing and integration processes before the mainnet hard fork in 4 weeks.
“The teams at @cardanostiftung & IOG will be working closely with exchanges and DApp/tool developers throughout this process. As soon as we are confident ecosystem partners are comfortable & ready, we’ll submit an updated proposal to upgrade the mainnet to Vasil,” the tweet read.
Once integrated on the mainnet, the new upgrade is designed to allow faster block creation and greater scalability for decentralized apps [dapps] running on Cardano.
The upgrade is widely anticipated by both developers and investors of Cardano. Since integrating smart contracts, the network has seen explosive growth in activity.
Developers rely on smart contracts to build decentralized applications like DEXs, NFTs, or other yield farming platforms.
These new dApps will likely bring more users and developers onto the blockchain. Before smart contracts, DeFi’s uses on Cardano were comparatively low, unlike its bigger rival Ethereum.
However, Ethereum became notorious for its exorbitant high fees. This is because the addition of smart contracts creates more congestion and traffic lowering the network speed and increasing transaction cost.
Cardano’s Diffusion Pipelining To Increase The Transaction Throughput
The new Vasil hard fork is an attempt to mitigate the increased congestion. To achieve the same, Cardano came up with a solution called Diffusion Pipelining.
“Vasil improvements include higher throughput through diffusion pipelining to a better developer experience via much-improved script performance & efficiency [plus lower costs].”
Earlier, validators must adhere to some specific steps in order to complete the block verification process as Cardano uses a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism, which was tedious and time-consuming.
Under the diffusion pipelining, each of these steps would be completed in their entirety before the block is moved to the next validator.
The team claimed the above feature would boost the transaction speed and with faster speed on a blockchain, fees tend to be lower.
With that said, the introduction of such improvements, as well as other smart contract upgrades, will likely continue to attract DeFi developers and new users.