Cardano Vasil upgrade ready with all ‘critical mass indicators’ achieved

The Cardano Vasil upgrade is set to take place in less than 24 hours on Thursday, with the Cardano team noting all three “critical mass indicators” needed to trigger the upgrade are now met.

A Wednesday update on Twitter by the company behind Cardano, Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), states that within the last 48 hours, 13 cryptocurrency exchanges had confirmed their readiness for the hard fork, representing over 87% of Cardano’s (ADA) liquidity.

Of the top exchanges for ADA liquidity, Coinbase is the only exchange listed as “in progress” regarding its integration status, according to an ecosystem readiness page by IOHK.

However, a recent tweet by Coinbase has already hinted that it will support the fork, saying ADA transactions will be halted for maintenance “for the Cardano Vasil hard fork.”

Originally intended for a June launch, the Vasil upgrade has seen its launch day twice rescheduled, most recently due to a bug discovered in Cardano’s prior node version, which created incompatibility issues.

With an updated Vasil node in place, over 98% of mainnet blocks are now being created by the updated nodes, while the blockchain’s top decentralized applications (DApps) have also confirmed their readiness, marking all three metrics needed for the upgrade go-ahead. 

News of the upgrade has seen social media chatter about ADA increase by 35.16% over the past seven days from Monday, according to market intelligence platform Santiment, third behind Ripple and Ethereum.

Once live, the upgrade will be the blockchain’s most significant since its Alonzo hard fork in September last year, which brought functionality for smart contracts for the first time. This upgrade aims to bring smart contract enhancements, reduced costs and increased throughput on the network.

IOHK said one of the most significant upgrades brought by the fork is faster block creation as they can be transmitted without full validation.

The Vasil upgrade is named after the late artist Vasil Stoyanov Dabov, a Cardano community member and ambassador who passed away in December 2021 due to a pulmonary embolism.

Currently, ADA’s price sits at $0.44, according to CoinGecko, down 3.4% over 24 hours and down over 85% from its $3.09 all-time high on Sept. 2, 2021.