White smoke from the Cardano camp, finally! After an earlier delay, Cardano parent company Input Output announced the Vasil hardfork to happen on September 22. It will mean more capacity and more elbow room for developers to build powerful applications.

'This was one of the long ones. Probably the hardest update we ever had to do.' admitted Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson in a live video after the announcement of the postponed event. The release date for Vasil was supposed to be July 29th.

Hoskinson went on to explain the extra carefulness with which the developers rolled out all the tests. Cardano is known for its thorough approach to software development. In contrast to the 'build-fast-and-break-things' culture of many blockchain projects (hi, Solana!), Cardano claims to "do our homework upfront so we don't end up suffering the consequences." That isn't to say that any approach is better, they are just different paths to improvement.

What is Vasil?

Vasil is one of the upgrades that Cardano has in the pipeline to enable higher speed and transaction throughput. It will also allow for more 'expressiveness', as coders call it. This term refers to a measure of the variety and quantity of ideas that programming languages can represent.

According to Hoskinson, a fundamental question that each project must answer, is: 'Will you start with maximum expressiveness and then scale it back if you encounter problems, like Ethereum has done?'Cardano opts for the diametrically opposed path. It started with minimal expressiveness. Vasil is a step on the way of broadening the universe of things that can get implemented. It will help a lot of decentralized application (dApp) developers.

A Bulgarian mathematician
Vasil is named after a Bulgarian mathematician. All the milestones on Cardano's roadmap are named after important figures in computer science or related disciplines. For example, the project is named after Italian mathematician Gerolamo Cardano. And the symbol of the currency ADA is is named after English mathematician Ada Lovelace.

Since the announcement, Cardano has outperformed Ethereum and Bitcoin with around 7%. Still, the price has been continuing to suffer from bear market sentiment.