Cardano (ADA) is getting closer to launching its highly anticipated Vasil network upgrade, which aims to scale and improve the overall user experience.
According to Cardano development firm Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), the project will begin the process of hard-forking from the testnet to the mainnet on July 3rd, which will take at least four weeks to complete.
“We’re delighted to report that in the last few minutes we have submitted an updated proposal to hard fork the Cardano Testnet, and commence the countdown for the Vasil mainnet upgrade.
With over 75% of testnet blocks being created by the new Vasil node (1.35.0) we now have a good chain density to proceed safely.”
The extended time frame will give developers and stake pool operators as well as crypto exchanges the opportunity to fully test the mainnet and make internal adjustments as needed.
IOHK says among the new improvements will be “higher throughput through diffusion pipelining to a better developer experience via much-improved script performance and efficiency (plus lower costs).”
The upgrade was named in honor of Vasil St. Dabov, a Cardano community member and blockchain advocate who passed away last December. Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson paid him tribute at the time.
Back in April, Cardano performed an upgrade that increased its network’s block size by 10% from 80 kilobytes (KB) to 88 KB, just three months after an upgrade that saw an increase from 70 KB to 80 KB. All told the block size grew by nearly 26%.
At time of writing, Cardano native asset ADA is down 2.16% on the day, trading for $0.45.
ADA is the 8th-ranked crypto asset by market cap and remains down 32.8% from its monthly high of $0.67 on May 31st.
