Cardano’s Vasil upgrade goes live, all you need to know

"Vasil will enhance Cardano's smart contract capabilities through Plutus V2, which adds greater efficiency to an already powerful smart contract platform," said Cardano Foundation CEO Frederik Gregaard in an interview with Decrypt. "Ultimately, it will reduce script execution costs and transaction size, plus improve throughput," he added.

Along with the Vasil update, Cardano is also working on its layer-2 scaling solution, Hydra. The L2 network will process transactions off-chain, thereby allowing for better throughput on the mainnet. Therefore, support through Hydra will increase the scalability of Cardano's decentralised applications.

As such, news of the Vasil update going live has had a positive impact on Cardano's price action. ADA, the network's native cryptocurrency, has climbed nearly 6.65 percent over the last 24 hours following the success of the update and is currently trading at $0.4723.

However, these updates will not be available to developers until September 27. This is because the features introduced by the upgrade will only go live on the mainnet after one epoch, which is around five days on the Cardano network.

Charles Hoskinson, the Co-Founder of Cardano, described the upgrade as one of the most challenging and complex tasks undertaken by the project devs since the launch of the blockchain in 2017. The update was previously scheduled for June, but bugs and compatibility issues held up the process, resulting in the update being pushed back twice.

The eventual upgrade date happens to be Bulgarian Independence Day. This is a major coincidence, given that the Vasil update was named after Bulgarian computer engineer Vasil St. Dabov. He was the Chief Blockchain Advisor at Quanterall and a Cardano Ambassador before passing away in December 2021.

The Vasil update is part of Cardano's third development cycle and is seen by many as the largest improvement to the network since its launch. As such, the news of the update successfully going live has already sent ADA prices rallying. However, the actual efficacy of the update will be seen on September 27, when the network improvements come into effect.