Cardano’s Vasil Hard Fork Goes Live
The fork was applied on September 22 – according to the schedule, and took place as all key ecosystem metrics had been achieved:
- Over 98% of blocks are created by updates nodes,
- 13 crypto exchanges holding 87% of ADA liquidity have updated,
- Cardano’s top dApps confirmed their readiness.
A hard fork usually means that the network splits in two, but in the case of Cardano, the protocol updates without interruption, restart, or emergence of new blockchains. This is achieved with the help of a special technology called Cardano’s Hard Fork Combinator.
The changes introduced by the Vasil update will become fully available on September 27. The hard fork has increased Cardano throughput by reducing transaction size, significantly decreased the cost of transactions, and made them considerably faster. Cardano’s Plutus programming language has been updated, which improved smart contract interaction.
It is expected that the increased performance of Cardano will help substantially expand its ecosystem – Vasil has laid the ground for the emergence of complex DeFi products on the blockchain. We will see how fees drop and transaction speed rises in the next days and weeks, while the number of Cardano dApps and use cases is expected to grow over the next few months.
Vasil hard fork went smoothly for the ChangeNOW ecosystem. NOWPayments and NOWNodes continue their operation on updated Cardano infrastructure, and you can store, send, receive, and exchange ADA in NOW Wallet as usual. In ChangeNOW, users are welcome to swap Cardano for 450+ cryptocurrencies without registration and hidden fees.
