While ADA’s price has remained stagnant, Cardano is moving to the next stage of progress as announced by the development company behind the network, Input Output proposed increasing the network’s block size by 11%. This suggestion was put forth by the development wing on Wednesday in line with its plan to boost Cardano’s network capacity.
As per the developers, the block size that stood currently at 78KB will be pushed higher by 8K, to 80 KB.
The developers stated,
In simple words, blocks store transactions on a blockchain. To increase the size of the blocks meant more transactions can be included in each individual block, thus impacting the transactions times and overall network capacity.
To keep the effects to the positive side, a separate proposal was additionally triggered to increase the performance of the smart contract platform of the Cardano blockchain- Plutus. As per Input Output, this adjustment will increase Plutus script memory units per transaction from the current 12.5 million to 14 million.
“In addition, an update proposal has also today been triggered to increase #Plutus script memory units per transaction on the #Cardano mainnet from the current 12.5M to 14M – an increase of 1.5M.”
These changes will improve the performance of applications built on top of Cardano while also increasing the overall network capacity. These changes are in line with the network’s broader plan to increase transactional volumes and will come into effect at the boundary of epoch 319 on 4th February at 21:44:51 UTC.
These developments come at a perfect time for Cardano as it is moving towards becoming a decentralized finance [DeFi] hub. It has been witnessing a barrage of projects launching on the mainnet which leads to more traffic on the blockchain.
For Instance, the decentralized exchange SundaeSwap on Cardano was lately witnessing network congestion. Due to this swaps fail or do not go through until the congestion reduces. The current developments would help the decentralized applications to run more smoothly as demand increases.
The team concluded,
“We’re committed to delivering the ‘Basho’ scaling phase of the Cardano roadmap through 2022 as the ecosystem grows; improving speed & additional network capacity all the while maintaining security and an ongoing commitment to secure decentralization.”