Cardano is still going through a lot of developments and some features will have to be implemented by initiating a hard fork. The result will not be a chain split but more possibilities for developers to build their dApps and products on top of the Cardano blockchain. One of these events that were highly anticipated by the Cardano community was postponed yesterday.

What is Vasil, why is it important and why had IOG to postpone the announced release?

Vasil was meant to start in June

The Vasil hard fork was expected to be commenced on June 29th and is a vital part of the combined efforts to increase Cardanos throughput. With more decentralized applications more performance is needed. This is a problem that is inherent to all open and public blockchains since nobody has found a satisfying solution yet.

The hard fork is meant to introduce diffusion pipelining which will facilitate block propagation faster and is, therefore, an improvement to the consensus layer. Vasil is not the only development in the making in terms of speed and transaction throughput.

One measure that has already been taken is an increase of the block size that happened in April. Others like the second-layer solution Hydra are still under development.

Why is there a delay?

It’s not breaking news that Cardano’s development is taking a long time and that deadlines are not being met is also nothing new to the community. A delay was not necessarily to be expected but also came as no surprise.

According to a blog post, the team is very close to finalizing its work but there are still seven bugs that haven’t been resolved yet. While none of these bugs were considered to be severe, IOG still decided to wait for the mainnet release of Vasil and allow more time for testing.

The target date to fork the testnet has been moved to the end of June which will effectively postpone the mainnet hard fork approximately until the last week of July. Charles Hoskinson, as well as Nigel Hemsley, have reiterated that their work will always be guided by putting quality and security above all else. With the stalling market, the team seems to have more than enough time. Since the beginning of the bear market, DeFi volumes have constantly declined. Cardano still needs to scale but as long as the interest is low there is not so much pressure and most certainly more time to deliver Vasil.