After a long wait from fans and investors, developers at the Cardano (ADA) Foundation recently announced that Cardano’s Vasil hard fork will occur on September 22, 2022. This comes just one week after its biggest rival, Ethereum’s (ETH-USD) “Merge,” which is set to occur on September 16.
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The Vasil hard fork upgrade was expected to launch in late June 2022 but was delayed because of Terra’s collapse and the harsh market conditions, meaning that the team over at the Cardano foundation wanted to do all of the necessary tests and exercise caution before rolling out the upgrade.
What is Cardano?
Cardano is a public blockchain platform that is open-source and decentralized and can facilitate peer-to-peer transactions with its native cryptocurrency, “ADA.” It is the largest cryptocurrency to use a proof-of-stake blockchain, which is seen as a greener alternative to proof-of-work protocols, such as bitcoin (BTC-USD) and Ethereum.
Founded in 2015, Cardano considers itself as being an updated version of Ethereum and has defined itself with the likes of Solana (SOL), Polkadot (DOT), and others as a “third-generation” platform. Cardano also has a major and very important goal of providing banking services to the world’s unbanked.
What’s the Purpose of Cardano’s Hard Fork?
A hard fork is when participants on a blockchain network decide to split the chain, resulting in two versions of the same network or protocol. The Cardano hard fork aims to make the network much more scalable and improve the developer experience for Web3 developers to create decentralized apps (dApps) on Cardano.
This update will also include improvements to Plutus, Cardano’s smart contract platform. These changes will make it possible for developers to design blockchain-based apps that are more powerful and efficient.
The Biggest Upgrade in the History of the Network
The update has been delayed many times, with the reasons being cited as software issues and testing. Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, who previously co-founded Ethereum, said, “The Vasil hard fork was the hardest update we’ve ever had to do.”
“It really demonstrated that we need to build better processes and, you know, better foundations to launch things at this scale and magnitude,” he shared. “We kind of pushed the limit a bit on Vasil.” He also stated, “This is one of the long ones, probably the hardest update we’ve ever had to do as an ecosystem.”
The upgrade is named after its late Bulgarian community member, Vasil St. Dabov, who was the Chief Blockchain Advisor before his passing in December 2021.
Hoskinson also added, “What’s so amazing about that date is it randomly and just so happenly falls on the independence day of Bulgaria.”
Cardano Briefly Passes XRP in Market Cap
Recently, with the excitement of the up-and-coming Vasil upgrade, ADA passed XRP (XRP-USD) to be the seventh largest cryptocurrency, with a market cap near $17 billion. However, it has since retreated to the eighth spot.
Nonetheless, this extends the streak of good news for Cardano after its native token ADA was recently listed on the popular commission-free trading platform Robinhood.
The announcement of that listing on social media suggests that Cardano was added to the platform in response to customer demand. Cardano is now available to the platform’s 13.2 million monthly active users, which will make it much more accessible and could possibly boost its liquidity.
The Crypto Community is Optimistic about Cardano
The total number of Cardano wallets sits at approximately 3.6 million, and the number of addresses that actively sent or received ADA tokens on the blockchain had more than doubled by the end of November 2021. Reaching nearly 500,000 active addresses, the ADA coin became increasingly popular in 2021 as an alternative to Ethereum. The crypto community is very optimistic about the upgrade and expects the price of Cardano to surge to around 26% from now until the end of September.
Data from CoinMarketCap’s price estimate features shows that around 14,000 users predicted the cryptocurrency’s price for the end of the month, expecting ADA to trade at $0.62.
Conclusion: Cardano Still Has a Lot to Prove
Even though the latest news and upgrades managed to push the price higher and bring great enthusiasm to the Cardano ecosystem, the project still has a long way to go, considering that market conditions are still bearish, where prices of all the major cryptocurrencies are printing lower highs and lower lows.
Cardano is known for taking its time and working relatively slowly in a very fast-paced industry, while in the meanwhile, other projects like SOLANA, NEAR (NEAR), and Avalanche (AVAX) have already achieved much more scalable and fast networks.
If ADA wants to stay in the top 10 for the next decade, it’ll need to pick up the pace while continuing to deliver top-notch products.
As of now, ADA is trading at $0.49, just above its major support level of around $0.45. So, as long as the bulls are able to keep this level, the token can re-test its previous resistance at $0.50. However, in case the bears keep control and push the price lower, the next support area is a long way to go at around $0.40.
