Cardano's Vasil Upgrade Officially Launches on Mainnet

Following Ethereum's The Merge, Cardano has now completed its Vasil hard fork. The question remains: Will Cardano (ADA) experience a similar fate as Ethereum with its post-upgrade price action?

Relentless Effort

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has acknowledged that this is “the most challenging update we’ve ever undertaken,” given that it impacts nearly all technical layers of the Cardano network.

The Vasil hard fork is part of Cardano’s Basho era, focusing on optimization, scalability, and interoperability within the blockchain ecosystem. This upgrade is the result of relentless collaboration between Cardano’s core development team, IOG, Emurgo, and the Cardano community through Cardano Improvement Proposals (CIPs).

Finally, the Vasil upgrade was successfully activated at epoch 365 without any issues impacting users, at 4:44 AM on September 23 (Vietnam time).

Changes Post-Vasil Hard Fork

One of the most significant changes from the Vasil upgrade is the reduction in transaction fees on Cardano. Block aggregation and transaction validation processes have been streamlined without compromising system security, leading to reduced transaction processing times. Additionally, updates to Plutus (Cardano’s programming language) are expected to enhance the development experience for the blockchain’s developers.

Charles Hoskinson, Cardano’s founder, reiterated that this upgrade is indeed “the most challenging update we’ve ever implemented,” given its broad impact on nearly all technical aspects of the network.

For the Vasil upgrade to be activated, the following conditions had to be met:

(i) At least 75% of blocks on the mainnet needed to be produced by nodes running the latest version 1.35.3 (this number has now reached 99%);

(ii) About 25% of exchanges (equivalent to around 80% of ADA liquidity on the market) needed to be ready for the update; and

(iii) The top 10 DApps on Cardano (by TVL) needed to confirm that they had upgraded to the 1.35.3 node version.

Moving forward, on September 24, new features for Plutus will be launched on the PreProduction testnet, and three days later (September 27), these features will officially go live on Cardano’s Mainnet.

Price Action Post-Vasil Hard Fork

Following the hard fork, ADA's price has positively adjusted to $0.46, up from $0.43 before the Vasil upgrade. This increase occurred within less than a day after the FED’s interest rate adjustment announcement, which caused significant turbulence across the crypto market. Thus, considering ADA’s price before the FED meeting at $0.45, this movement essentially represents a return to the original value rather than a surprising turnaround.

1H Chart of ADA/USDT on Binance as of 07:50 AM, September 23, 2022