The price of most top cryptocurrencies noted substantial declines last year. In retrospect, bears thrived. Yet, the sluggish environment and macro uncertainty did not stop developers from doing their job. Ethereum’s Merge and Cardano’s Vasil hard fork took place last year. Alongside, other mid-cap projects also followed suit. Monero, for instance, completed its much-awaited privacy-focused upgrade in Q3 last year.
The same legacy has been carried forward this year as well. Ethereum’s Shanghai upgrade is slated for the first quarter, while Cardano is set to undergo a mainnet upgrade by mid-February. The latter is focused on making the cross-chain application-building process easier for developers.
The entire Cardano ecosystem has been prepping for the said upgrade for quite some time. A recent blog update revealed that core engineering teams at IOG and the Cardano Foundation, stake pool operators, dApp developers, and exchanges have performed “intensive integration testing” in the preview test environment since November last year. The same has yielded “positive results.”
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Upcoming upgrade ain’t complex as Vasil
Notably, the afore-highlighted upgrade is not as complex as the Vasil hard fork. It will neither have an impact on existing dApps.
This technology is now on the verge of being deployed on the Cardano mainnet. The pre-production test environment update will happen on Feb. 11 at 00:00:00 UTC. The mainnet upgrade will happen shortly thereafter. Affirming the same, the official blog post revealed,
“Based on that community polling, the mainnet upgrade is proposed tentatively for February 14, 2023, at 21:44:51 UTC.”
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On-chain, price performance
On Friday, Cardano was the second most active blockchain. With the assistance of over 53.18k active addresses, it settled $3.68 billion on-chain over the past 24 hours.
However, the price of Cardano’s native token ADA continues to remain neutral. After noting a mere 1.2% incline over the past week, it was seen moving sideways around $0.335 at press time.
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