Cardano: Here's What's New With Ongoing Vasil Hard Fork

According to the weekly development report prepared by Cardano's IOG, work continues to progress on the Vasil hard fork. IOG reports the work done on node improvements by the Cardano teams and the subsequent release of a new node v.1.35.3-rc1 to support Vasil testing on the devnet.

Every Friday, we publish our weekly #Cardano development update. So for the lowdown on what IOG's dev team has been working on last week, head on over and take a look👇 https://t.co/iVT0ZL1GhO

— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) August 5, 2022

Additionally, it states that a new dedicated preproduction environment has been spun up for the final stages of Vasil functionality testing. This new environment would provide improved chain density and a better developer experience and hence urged developers, SPOs and exchanges to use this environment rather than the main Cardano testnet.

On July 3, the IOG team hard forked the Cardano testnet to include Vasil functionality. After the announcement of the testnet hard fork, development continued with the initial node v.1.35.0. The IOG teams then proceeded to work on nodes v.1.35.1 and v.1.35.2 after bugs were discovered.

As reported by U.Today, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, while making brief comments on Vasil, mentions the new node v.1.35.3 as the likely candidate for the hard fork. Hoskinson added that he "doesn't anticipate any further delays unless anything new was uncovered."

The development of the Plutus contracts also continued ahead of the Vasil mainnet launch, which hopes to include three specific improvements to the Plutus v1 scripts: the Plutus evaluator speed improvements, updated cost model parameters, and datums and redeemers of other inputs.

The Plutus team updated the Plutus tools to the node v.1.35.3-rc1 and the Plutus contract emulator to allow Babbage transactions over the week, according to IOG.

Cardano native assets reach 5.7 million

IOG has released the latest statistics on the Cardano network in its weekly development report. Currently, 1,048 projects are building on Cardano, while 93 projects have recently been launched on Cardano. Cardano native tokens stand at 5.7 million, while Plutus scripts are now at 3,024. The number of Github commits was also at 2,683.

During the week, the monthly summary of on-chain statistics for July was released by the Cardano Foundation. The number of on-chain transactions increased to 47 million, while the number of Cardano wallets officially hit the 3.5 million mark. ADA was changing hands at $0.51, up 1.21% in the last 24 hours, per CoinMarketCap data.