Vasil upgrade and hard fork went live on Friday at 3:14 a.m. IST.
The upgrade significantly enhances the blockchain's performance and functionality.
On Thursday, blockchain company Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) announced the success of the Cardano mainnet hard fork on Twitter. Meanwhile, others saw the hard fork unfold in real-time on Twitter Spaces alongside Cardano co-founder Charles Hoskinson.
IOHK earlier noted that the fork's significant enhancement is block transmission without complete validation, enabling speedier block creation. Upgrades to its Plutus smart contracts for enhanced efficiency also allow decentralized applications to be deployed and run at a lesser cost.
The Plutus script upgrades will bring new features to the mainnet on September 27, after one epoch, which currently lasts about four days.
According to Bill Barhydt, founder of crypto trading platform Abra, the upgrade is a big win for developers. In addition, the decentralized financial platform Genius Yield tweeted that it was one of the most complex and significant modifications to the Cardano network ever done.
IOHK announced the upgrade date in early September, and the critical mass indicators required to trigger the hard fork were met in the 24 hours leading up to the event.
It comes after months of delays and rescheduling, with the initial debut date set for June. The upgrade was delayed twice because of difficulties on the testnet caused by bugs in a prior node version that created compatibility concerns.
Following the Vasil upgrade, Cardano is continuing to build its layer-2 scaling solution, the Hydra head protocol. The solution handles transactions outside of the Cardano blockchain while keeping it as the security and settlement layer.
The most recent Hydra update on September 16 revealed how the team resolved a known issue with the Hydra nodes. The protocol's launch date is unclear, however, it is expected in late 2022 or the first quarter of 2023.
According to CoinGabbar statistics, the announcement of the successful launch increased the Cardano price by nearly 4% in the last 24 hours to $0.46.
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