Cardano’s long-awaited Vasil upgrade finally went live on September 22 after several delays and technical setbacks. This was the biggest upgrade since the Alonzo hard fork last year and is touted as a turning point for the Cardano network.
It is designed to enhance Cardano’s scalability and general transaction throughput capacity in addition to boosting its decentralized applications (DApps) development capacity with the help of the hard fork combinator (HFC) approach.
On the infrastructure level, Vasil will pave the way for numerous other upcoming upgrades that aim to enable Cardano to increase its block size and TPS while simultaneously maintaining its PoS mechanism. Going forward, the improvement in the network’s stability and connectivity will also come into focus.
So far, the top 12 crypto exchanges by liquidity extended their support for the upgrade as per the latest data.
As of September 27, 44 cryptocurrency exchanges’ integration status shows “Ready.” These also include OKX, Gate.io, Crypto.com, Bitfinex, Bithumb, Hubo, eToro, and KuCoin, among others. Kraken is still in process of integration, while Coinbase and 21 other exchanges are marked “Not Ready.”
The upgrade was named after Bulgarian mathematician Vasil Stoyanov Dabov, a prominent member of the Cardano community, who passed away in December 2021 from pulmonary embolism.
A week after IOG and the Cardano Foundation triggered the most ambitious upgrade, other functionalities have now been made available to developers. These include – support for reference inputs, inline datums, reference scripts, collateral outputs, and a new Plutus cost model.
The total value locked in Cardano has mimicked ADA’s price action, which did not show any meaningful appreciation following the upgrade.
The TVL, currently at $76 million (staking excluded), was down by nearly 77% down from its ATH of $327 million in March, according to data from DeFiLlama. The TVL of leading Cardano DEX, Minswap, was at $39.49 million after declining by 6% over the past 24 hours.
Messari’s chart indicated that ADA’s transaction volume has taken a hit from its peak at almost $80 billion in August 2021 to a mere $3.6 billion at press time.