Cardano is under constant development and is moving through its Basho phase which means that scaling is the most important concern. Scalability has always been a huge topic for all cryptocurrencies or blockchain technologies. The problem is that developers usually want to achieve high scalability without sacrificing security and decentralization. This is also known as the blockchain trilemma and while many claimed that it has been solved it still persists today.

What is Vasil, why is it important and when will it start?

Vasil will improve Cardano

Vasil is the codename for a hard fork that was meant to be commenced in June. Since there were concerns that not enough testing was done, Vasil was postponed. It was last Sunday when the upgrade successfully started on the testnet.

With Vasil, several changes will come into effect. Plutus, the smart contract language is going to be improved and diffusion pipelining is going to be introduced. The upgrade could start as early as 4 weeks after the start on the testnet. This moves the release date somewhere to late July or early in August.

Vasil is not the only effort to increase Cardano’s scalability. The second-layer technology called Hydra will also play an important role in the future. That being said, users can expect Cardano to be improved but Vasil will not be a single answer to the question of how its blockchain is going to scale.

Why is this important for Cardano?

According to IOHK, the Cardano blockchain is going to be the home of hundreds of Defi applications. Many have already been released and with increased usage, these dApps become directly dependent on Cardano’s scalability.

Imagine that each transaction has to go through a door. When the door is too small and more people want to go through, the traffic is going to jam and everything is slowed down. The task for Cardano’s developers is to either make the door bigger – which already happened with an increase in block size – or to open up new doors to exhaust all the transactions that would like to get through at the same time.

Cardano is late to the Defi party compared to Ethereum, Polkadot, or Solana. Still, it has the chance to grow since all other smart contract platforms are facing similar problems and have to find answers to them. The race for a reliable and highly scalable blockchain technology that offers smart contract capabilities isn’t over and Cardano has the chance to use this bear market to strengthen its position.