Cardano Global Development Group Hard-Forks Testnet Before Mainnet Upgrade for Improved Scalability and Performance

Cardano (ADA) successfully completed a hard fork of its testnet to prepare for the upcoming Vasil upgrade. The new development will bring greater scalability and performance improvements to the network.

The latest announcement was made by Input-Output Global (IOG), the tech firm behind Cardano. IOHK (rebranded to IOG) now calls on developers, exchanges, and stake pool operators to launch their projects on the testnet. This way, any necessary adjustments will be noticed earlier on before Vasil becomes a reality on the mainnet.

Cardano Launches Vasil on Testnet

The Vasil hard fork is a key feature of Cardano's Basho phase. This is the fourth in a series of five building phases of the network. The previous three focused on the foundation (Byron), decentralization (Shelley), and smart contracts (Goguen), while Basho's aim is scalability.

Once it is running on the mainnet, Vasil will introduce a range of scalability features. Among them are higher throughput or block creation speed and better “script performance and efficiency.” Additionally, all users will benefit from low network costs. Even further, Vasil will enable interoperability between Cardano and other blockchains.

For now, IOG says that the Vasil proposal for Cardano mainnet will be released only when the community is "ready and comfortable." The company, however, expects this to happen in the next four weeks.

IOG had previously scheduled the Vasil mainnet hard fork for June 29. The engineering team, however, agreed to postpone the event to fix several non-serious bugs.

Smart contracts can be used to increase growth.

The previous major development for Cardano was the introduction of smart contract functionality. This led to a number of DApps, including DeFi protocols. The ecosystem also saw increasing developer activity and a growing number of DApps despite facing concurrency issues.

As of the last update by DeFi TVL aggregator DeFi Llama, Cardano's total value locked (TVL) is $115.85 million. WingRiders, which is a decentralized exchange, has the largest TVL at $49.7 million.

Despite the fact that Vasil is a big deal for Cardano, the news of its deployment on the network's testnet hasn't done much to boost ADA's price. At press time, the token was trading at $0.44, down by 0.4%.