Cardano’s ecosystem is thriving as the total value locked on its blockchain is steadily increasing. Still, it seems that the project is lagging behind when compared to the Binance Smart Chain, Solana, Fantom, or Avalanche. This is not only because smart contracts were introduced later to Cardano but also because there are still several developments in the making to scale the technology faster and which is a prerequisite to growing the network even bigger.

One important milestone is just around the corner. What is Vasil and how will it help Cardano?

Pipelining will speed things up

The Vasil hard fork will improve the overall performance that is needed to bring more decentralized applications to the Cardano blockchain. One important factor will be diffusion pipelining which is an improvement to the consensus layer and will facilitate faster block propagation.

It is worth mentioning that Vasil is not the one solution to the issue but rather one of many upgrades that will be delivered to reach that goal. Once Vasil will be released in June things will get more interesting according to Charles Hoskinson who said via Twitter that many applications are waiting for Vasil prior to launch on the Cardano blockchain.

Interestingly enough, the name of the hard fork does this time not stem from a scientist or any other historic person but is named after the ADA ambassador Vasil Dabov.

The performance will be improved through several changes

The improvements won’t stop with pipelining. Cardano is going to scale through a variety of solutions. Among them are sidechains and Hydra, a second layer solution that should scale Cardano even further. Many of the updates are expected to work fully in 2023.

In the meantime, Ethereum has delayed the Merge. The event was expected in June but has been postponed without a release date. The Merge is probably going to happen this fall and since Ethereum is moving slowly in changing and scaling Cardano has still time to resolve scalability issues in order to compete.

It remains to be seen if scalability and cheaper fees are the most important factor to drive more users to Cardano. Both already have been achieved by other blockchains but without threatening Ethereum. It seems that the network effect will play the most important role and so far, most users are attached to the Ethereum blockchain that is also using second-layer technologies like optimistic rollups to scale while working on sharding and the transition to proof of stake.