The Ethereum Merge is done and dusted, and the crypto ecosystem is looking forward to the next major upgrade. The clock is ticking and Cardano’s Vasil hardfork is now just less than a day away. The upgrade, on its part, will enhance the network’s performance by increasing throughput, script efficiency, and reducing latency in block transmission.
Input Output Hong Kong [IOHK] took Twitter to reveal that the team has now successfully achieved all 3 critical mass indicators.
At the moment, over 98% of mainnet blocks are being created by the Vasil node. Top Cardano decentralized applications by TLV have confirmed their readiness for the event. Top exchanges continue to make good progress on their updates, with 39 of them already upgraded. Resultantly, IOHK asserted,
“… we are confident we will be able to proceed with triggering the hard fork at the appropriate time…. Once everyone is comfortable and ready, in close collaboration with the Cardano Foundation, the IOG team will trigger the upgrade for the Cardano mainnet. “
The final countdown
The preview test environment has been running successfully for some time with Vasil’s capability. The said environment matches mainnet configuration and will allow the community to continue final-stage integration/upgrade testing.
As far as important dates are concerned, the mainnet upgrade is set to take place today at 21:45 UTC on epoch 365. Per data from Cardanoscan, the current epoch will end in approximately 16 hours and 48 minutes, post which the transition will be instigated.
The Cardano network, as such, splits time into periods called epochs. One epoch lasts for approximately 5 days. This means that if an epoch starts in the middle of Sunday, it’d end in the middle of Friday.
Furthermore, after 22 September when the next epoch starts on the 27th, the Plutus V2 cost model will be made available on the mainnet.
Confirming the same, IOHK’s blogpost noted,
September 22nd (epoch 365 at 21:45 UTC) – Vasil Mainnet HFC event (era transitions from Alonzo -> Babbage)
September 27th (epoch 366 at 21:45 UTC) – Plutus V2 Cost Model available on Mainnet
Price-wise, Cardano’s native token ADA has not been that reactive. On the daily, it was down by around 3% and was trading at $0.443 at press time.