ADA Slumps as Cardano Team Delays Vasil Hard Fork

Key Insights:

• Cardano has delayed its long-awaited upgrade until the end of July.
• IOHK head Charles Hoskinson is confident things will go smoothly.
• ADA prices have lost 23% over the past fortnight.

Earlier this week, the core Input Output Global team working on the Vasil Cardano upgrade announced that they were close to completion, but there were seven outstanding bugs.

“We have agreed NOT to send the hard fork update proposal to the testnet today to allow more time for testing,” it stated.

The previously planned date for the mainnet hard fork was June 29, but this has now been delayed a month to the last week in July.

IOHK boss Charles Hoskinson took to Twitter on June 21 to explain the announcement. He added that the upgrade is “code complete,” meaning they could “probably flip the switch” and launch it. He also explained that additional testing was added in the wake of the Terra ecosystem collapse.

Vasil Upgrade – The State of Play https://t.co/n5SXsPlSjS

— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) June 20, 2022

Cardano Vasil for Dapp Developers

The hark fork, which involves splitting the blockchain, was highly anticipated within the Cardano community as it heralds several crucial updates.

Vasil is part of the Basho upgrade phase, which aims to introduce “diffusion pipelining,” facilitating faster block propagation and validation times. Essentially, it allows larger blocks and increased transaction throughput without changing the consensus mechanism.

This will greatly benefit dapps (decentralized applications) and NFT projects (nonfungible tokens) that have chosen Cardano to run on. Hoskinson explained that:

“This is not a hard fork for the average Cardano user. The Vasil hard fork has always been specifically for dapp developers.”

He added that he didn’t anticipate that the delay would affect the rollout of all of the dapps waiting to deploy on the network. Vasil is the largest and most significant for the Cardano ecosystem. It also introduces improvements to smart contract capabilities with a new technology called Hydra to further increase network throughput.

Cardano is a blockchain network that rivals Ethereum (ETH), offering the same technology such as smart contract and dapp support. The difference is that it has already scaled, whereas Ethereum native scaling is unlikely to happen until next year, though there are plenty of options with layer-2 networks.

ADA Prices Back Down

Cardano’s native token, ADA, has taken a hit on the hard fork delay news. ADA rose to a weekly high of $0.508 on June 21 but has since declined by almost 8% to $0.468 at the time of writing.

Furthermore, ADA has been hit hard in the crypto bear market, slumping 23% over the past fortnight. It has wiped out all gains made over the past 17 months and is trading almost 85% down from its September all-time high of $3.09.

Major upgrades often boost token prices, but with so much negative sentiment surrounding crypto markets, this may not be the case for Cardano.