Cardano Deploys ‘Vasil’ Upgrade

Cardano, the world’s fifth-largest blockchain with a market capitalization of $15B, successfully deployed a highly-anticipated upgrade Thursday that aims to improve smart contract performance and network throughput.

The performance improvements are expected to benefit decentralized finance applications built on Cardano, and several are set to launch in the coming weeks.

Dubbed Vasil, the upgrade is named after Vasil St. Dabov, a longtime Cardano community member who died in 2021.

Frederik Gregaard, the CEO of the Cardano Foundation, a nonprofit supporting the Cardano blockchain, said Vasil will “reduce script execution costs and transaction size” of smart contracts and improve network speeds.

Tim Harrison, vice president of community at Input Output, a company that contributes to research and development for Cardano, called the upgrade “a step-change in the blockchain’s capabilities.”

“Yet the regular ADA holder using Cardano for transactions and DApps doesn’t need to do anything, as it all happens mostly behind the scenes,” he wrote in a recent blog post.

During testing, Artano, a Cardano NFT project, found that using Vasil reduced the cost of buying and bidding on NFTs by more than 75%.

Cardano’s native token, ADA, is up almost 2% in the past day.