Cardano (ADA) Vasil Hard Fork Delayed Until End of July

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.

The highly anticipated Vasil upgrade for the Cardano blockchain has been pushed back to the last week of July, according to an announcement by the core Input Output Global team working on the project.

The team had previously planned to begin testing the upgrade on the testnet on June 21, with the mainnet hard fork scheduled for June 29. However, they stated that they will be delaying the testnet testing to allow for more time for testing seven outstanding bugs.

IOHK head 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, is 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. As Hoskinson explained:

“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.

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.