Cardano’s big update, Vasil hard fork expected to land in June
Tim Harrison, VP of Community and Ecosystem at Cardano, hints at an upcoming mid-month update that will address the hard fork combinator (HFC) event that is expected to take place in June. Harrison also shared IOHK’s tweet about Plutus enhancements that will increase Cardano’s throughput in June.
Cardano’s big update, the Vasil hard fork, is expected to land in June. The upgrade in question appears to be named after Vasil Dabov, the late Bulgarian mathematician who was a prominent member of the Cardano community.
The June event remains of key importance for the Cardano ecosystem as it should accentuate growth. In March, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, while commenting on the growth of the ecosystem, explained that many decentralized applications (dApps) were waiting for Vasil’s hard fork to benefit from pipelining.
Pipelining is a scaling solution that accelerates the process of distributing blocks, thus drastically reducing the “dead time” between them. It would make it possible to implement more aggressive changes such as reference scripts, which could dramatically increase the blockchain’s throughput.
IOHK shares two things to expect
As noted in an IOHK blog post, Plutus script referencing and reference entries are two major improvements that should be included in the June Vasil hard fork.
Along these lines, CIPs for reference inputs (CIP-31) and reference scripts (CIP-33) have been submitted for implementation on Cardano and are expected to be implemented as part of the Vasil hard fork in June.
These Plutus enhancements, in addition to other scaling enhancements, will increase the throughput of decentralized applications (dApps), decentralized finance (DeFi), RealFi, products, smart contracts, and exchanges built or running on Cardano.
CIP-31 introduces a new mechanism for accessing information in datums, a reference input. Transaction outputs include datums, which allow for the storing and retrieval of data on the blockchain.
CIP-33 provides script referencing, which is the ability to refer to a script without including it in every transaction, thereby reducing the contribution of scripts to transaction size. Referencing scripts in multiple transactions can reduce transaction size, increase throughput, and reduce script execution costs.
