No Vasil for Now: Cardano’s Hard Fork Update Postponed

This latest upgrade, which looks to provide a “massive performance improvement to Cardano” and its smart contract capabilities, is set to introduce four network improvements dubbed “CIP31, CIP32, CIP33, and CIP40” aimed at reducing the size of transactions. They are also expected to increase the network’s throughput and lower transaction fees.

In a blog post, IOHK’s head of delivery and project Nigel Hemsley said that the team working on the project “is extremely close to finalizing the core work”. However, several bugs remain outstanding and, therefore, need to be improved. He added that the errors are not severe.

The work on Vasil has been the most complex program of development and integration to date, from several angles. It’s a challenging process that requires not only significant work from core teams but also close coordination across the ecosystem.

Hemsley said.

Once the testnet has been forked, which is set to occur this week, it will take another month for the developers to “carry out any required integration and testing work” before the Vasil hard fork is launched on the mainnet in late July.

This is only reasonable and should not be rushed. The working assumption should therefore now be a Cardano mainnet hard fork occurring during the last week of July. We recognize that this news will be disappointing to some. However, we are taking an abundance of caution to ensure that we do this deployment correctly.

Hemsley noted.

Cardano’s Vasil hard fork is the most significant upgrade since the Alonzo hard fork in September, which enabled smart contracts on the network. 

Cardano’s native token ADA is trading at $0.4687 press-time.