The much-awaited Cardano Vasil Hard Fork was officially deployed on Thursday. The upgrade is supposed to increase the capacity of the Cardano blockchain and reduce transaction costs. Shortly after the upgrade, a spike in ADA price saw record highs above $0.48 during the early Asian session on Friday.
Vasil Upgrade Is A “Big Win” For DeFi
Cardano’s Vasil upgrade and hard fork officially went live as scheduled on September 22, significantly enhancing the performance and capability of the blockchain.
On Thursday, Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) – the company behind Cardano – announced the successful deployment of the Vasil hard fork on Twitter, saying the Input Output Global team (IOG team), in collaboration with the Cardano Foundation, had “successfully hard forked the Cardano mainnet via an HFC event, thus deploying new #Vasil features to the chain.”
IOHK also stated that the upgrade is expected to “bring significant performance & capability enhancements to #Cardano,” including increased throughput capability through “diffusion pipelining to a better developer experience with much-improved script performance, efficiency & lower costs.”
The Singapore-based blockchain company had previously stated that the Vasil hard fork would bring significant upgrades to Cardano, allowing block transmission without full validation resulting in faster block creation. Plutus smart contracts upgrades aim to increase efficiency, allowing decentralized applications (dApps) to be deployed and run at lower costs on the network.
The Cardano community followed the hard fork launch in a live Twitter Spaces with Charles Hoskinson – Cardano’s co-founder. In a Twitter post responding to media comments that emphasized the delay of the upgrade, Hoskinson celebrated Vasil’s success stating,
“We’ve just completed a major milestone that took coordination and testing from people and companies across the world.”
The founder of the crypto trading platform Abra Bill Barhydt referred to the upgrade as a “big win for developers.” Barhydt shared his sentiments in a Tweet, saying:
“Congrats to Cardano ($ADA) team on Vasil hard fork. More hard work in crypto is paying off. Making UTXOs and inputs accessible to scripts/Plutus without spending them is a big win for developers. Well done!”
Decentralized finance (DeFi) platform Genius Yield tweeted that the upgrade was “one of the most complex and consequential updates to the #Cardano network ever done.” The platform urged the Cardano community to gain more insights into the Vasil upgrade and “why it’s so critical for moving $ADA and the ecosystem forward,” as broken down in its Genius academy article.
IOHK confirmed the date of the Vasil Hard Fork early this month, while the “critical mass indicators” required to trigger the upgrade was achieved 24 hours before it went live.
The upgrade comes after several reschedules and delays. Initially, the Vasil hard fork was expected to occur in June 2022. It was postponed twice because of issues on the testnet caused by bugs in a previous node version resulting in compatibility issues. Cardano has implemented several hard fork events – such as the Mary hard fork, which allowed developers to create native tokens or migrate existing projects to Cardano.
ADA Price Reaction To The Upgrade
Following the successful Vasil upgrade, Cardano (ADA) price surged upward by nearly 11% from the $0.4345 low reached on Thursday to Friday’s high of around $0.4823. At the time of writing, ADA was exchanging at $0.461, up 1.31% on the day, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
The bulls will now try to push the price above the 50-day simple moving average (SMA) at $0.4858. A move above the $0.50 psychological level will be the next logical move if they succeed.
On the downside, the relative strength index (RSI) was still in the negative region. The price strength at 47 suggested that if the bulls do not sustain the buying momentum, ADA could drop lower to revisit the $0.44 support level.
