It appears that work on updating the Cardano network is entering its final phase. The CEO of the project, Charles Hoskinson called on operators to test blockchain optimization solutions.
Vasil getting closer, but Mithril first
Despite a number of impediments, the Cardano team seems to be moving closer to an event called Hard Fork Vasil. Scheduled for the end of June, the event has already been postponed several times. Its final date has not been announced, but as Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson suggests, it is expected to take place as early as September.
In order to make things run smoothly, Hoskinson called on Twitter for pool operators (SPOs), to get involved in testing Mithril.
Mithril is a solution developed by Cardano developers. Its task is to optimize the process of sharing data between applications, as well as network nodes. Without Mithril, this kind of procedure is very labor-intensive. It requires a lot of time, mainly due to the need for new nodes to download and verify each block. Meanwhile, Mithril completely removes these difficulties. The operation thus proceeds thanks to snapshots of the state of the blockchain, in a signature scheme based on the existing staking.
The nodes have met the requirements
Mithril was first presented to a wider audience at the Cardano Summit in 2021. As the team assures, the involvement of all SOPs in it will ensure that this optimization solution will achieve fully secure status. Moreover, its launch is expected to take only 40 minutes. This puts it as the best available method for this kind of improvement.
Meanwhile, we learn that one of the three requirements for launching Hard Fork Vasil has just been fulfilled. On Monday, August 29, it was reported that 75% of the nodes producing the blocks were running version 1.35.3. This percentage was the minimum required for the upgrade. At the time of writing this article, 82% of mining pools are already running in the new version. We reported on the necessity of running the new node in an article titled: “Cardano developers reach significant milestone as Vasil update testing enters final phase”. Read it if you want to know the essence of its introduction.
Exchanges and dApps also undergoing updates
For the launch of Vasil, it is also necessary that exchanges and operators of the largest decentralized applications initiate their activities in version 1.35.0. The number of integrated exchanges must be a minimum of twenty-five. At the time of this writing, only four of them have upgraded. For the rest, work is still in progress. The same number of upgrades has occurred for dApp’s. Here, on the other hand, the requirements are lower, with only 10 entities.
