Cardano Founder: ‘Vasil’ Hard Fork Will Deliver ‘A Massive Performance Improvement’

On Tuesday (April 12), Charles Hoskinson, who is Co-Founder and CEO of IO Global (aka “IOG”, formerly known as “IOHK”), the company responsible for Cardano’s research and development, provided an update on various matters of interest to $ADA HODLers.

He communicated this information in a video released on his YouTube channel yesterday. Because he had been away in Poland and Switzerland during the past two weeks, Hoskinson decided to “make a roll-up video” about “a variety of different things” he has been busy with and that the Cardano community had asked questions about recently.

The IOG CEO started by mentioning that they are preparing for the upcoming Consensus 2022 event, which is being held held June 9-12 in Austin, Texas:

“We’re renting a large pavilion there, and we’re going to go along with many of the other members of the Cardano ecosystem, and hopefully we’ll be able to showcase that Cardano is open for business.“

Next, he mentioned why he is excited about the Vasil hard fork, which is also expected to take place in June:

“As many of, you know, a major major major hard fork combinator event is happening in June, which is the Vasil hard fork, and that is going to contain pipelining, which will be a massive performance improvement to Cardano, alongside the first wave of significant Plutus enhancements since Plutus shipped in September.“

On February 1, John Woods, Director of Cardano Architecture at IOG, published a blog post, in which he introduced pipelining:

“Pipelining is, effectively, an evolution in Cardano’s ‘plumbing’. It is a key element in our scaling plan this year, one in the series of published steps covering our methodical approach to flex Cardano’s capacity as the ecosystem grows…

“Pipelining – or more precisely, diffusion pipelining – is an improvement to the consensus layer that facilitates faster block propagation. It enables even greater gains in headroom, which will enable further increases to Cardano’s performance and competitiveness...

“Pipelining is just one of the pillars supporting Cardano’s scaling this year. Combined, all these changes will lead Cardano to a position where it is faster than its competitors, and a highly competitive platform for decentralized finance (DeFi) this year.“

As you may remember, one month ago, Hoskinson said on Twitter that there are many Cardano DeFi apps that are waiting for Vasil hard fork combinator (HFC) event, and once that happens, we should see an even more impressive growth in Cardano’s TVL.

In case you ar wondering why the June hard fork is called “Vasil”, on 10 December 2021, Hoskinson explained that he was going to honour his Bulgarian friend and Cardano ambassador Vasil Dabov — who had died recently — by naming the June hard fork after him. Dabov was a blockchain consultant, Haskell practioneer, and experienced ginkgologist.

In a blog post published on February 28, IOG explained what changes we could expect to see in the June and October hard fork events:

“Our February release is just the start. Throughout 2022 – and focused around June and October hard fork combinator (HFC) events – we will introduce an array of scaling enhancements. These include key elements of our scaling plan like pipelining, new Plutus CIPs, UTXO on-disk storage and Hydra. In combination with parameter adjustments, these features will enhance Cardano’s throughput and optimize the system to accommodate an increasing range of decentralized finance (DeFi) apps, smart contracts, and DEXs.

“Plus as outlined in our recent Cardano360 February show, IOG is working across a host of new products and features, from a DApp store and a new light wallet product, to Mithril fast sync solution and sidechains. All the while an incredible community contributes new DApps, services, sites, tools and APIs to keep building out a flourishing decentralized ecosystem.“

In an interview (released on March 2) with Marco Monty Montemagno, the host of “InsideW3B”, Hoskinson said that “June and October are going to be great months” for Cardano.

When Hoskinson was asked about his three top priorities, he replied:

“Right now, I would say commercial comparability, sustainability, and self-determination are the three big things that we are really working on.

“In terms of commercial comparability, we focused an enormous amount of effort in the beginning of the project on correctness and scientific excellence… so we developed all of these phenomenal protocols…

“This year all these updates are coming that are massively improving the scalability and expressiveness of the system so that you’ll get the same type of performance you’re seeing from systems like Solana and so forth. Or at least in the same orders of magnitude... Not only do you get all the security, the correctness, the resilience and a great three-million person community, but you also get the best of what competitors are bringing to bear…

“June and October are going to be great months for us because those are the months where we’re turning a lot of new features on... in terms of improvements in Plutus, side chains, pipelining… and there is some phenomenal applied research threads like Hydra…

“In terms of sustainability, you’d like a system that as it operates, it gets more efficient, more scalable, and has the ability to grow at an organic pace, and the system contains that same cost center and standard of performance that you come to know and love… That means you need things like Mithril…

“And then self-determination, which is unique to Cardano and a few others like Tezos (XTZ)… We have a great governance layer. You hold data, you can vote. And you can participate in the governance of the system... Also, Cardano has its own treasury system. Like any government, it has the ability to print money. And as a result, you can use that to fund its development. So, it’s not just self-determination — it’s also self-funding, self-bootstrapping.“

At the time of writing (i.e. 8:54 a.m. UTC on April 13), on Coinbase, $ADA is trading around $0.9558.

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