In a recent tweet, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson commented on the growth of the ecosystem, explaining that many decentralized applications (dApps) are waiting for the Vasil hard fork in order to benefit from pipelining.
According to DeFi Llama's rankings of decentralized finance platforms, Cardano is currently in a distant 28th place. While its total value locked (TVL) has nearly doubled over the past month, it is far from catching up with other major “Ethereum killers,” such as Terra, BSC, Avalanche and Solana.
Presently, there’s only a few functioning applications on Cardano. MuesliSwap became the first decentralized exchange to launch on the mainnet in late December. SundaeSwap, the most anticipated Cardano project to date, was off to a rocky start, with users experiencing technical issues due to severe network congestion. Presently, the top Cardano DEX has a modest $114.35 million in total value locked. Minswap, which made its debut earlier this week, has $63.72 million.
Yet, there’s plenty of apps in the pipeline that are ready to be deployed on the mainnet.The upgrade in question appears to be named after Vasil Dabov, the late Bulgarian mathematician who was a prominent member of the Cardano community.
The hard fork combinator (HFC) event is expected to take place this June.
Pipelining is a scaling solution that accelerates the process of distributing blocks, thus drastically reducing the “dead time” between them. It would make it possible to implement more aggressive changes such as reference scripts, which could dramatically increase the blockchain’s throughout.
Other on-chain scaling solutions include incremental block size increases, node enhancements, on-disk storage, and so on. There are also off-chain solutions such as Hydra, sidechains and Mithril.
Arman Shirinyan
