What will the next Cardano hard fork bring?

Cardano is gearing up for the next hard fork.

Cardano is gearing up for the next hard fork. With the upcoming "Vasil" upgrade slated for late July, the blockchain should get a sizable boost that should be noticeable on many levels. But what concrete improvements will that bring? At least many ADA fans are expecting some big strides from the hard fork.

The Next Phase

Cardano’s development is split into stages. The network is currently in the "Basho era," named after the Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō. Whereas the previous phase focused on smart contract integration, this phase centers on scalability. More transactions, faster processing, and a focus on interoperability: in Basho, Cardano aims for mass adoption. The hard fork Vasil is a key building block to make this happen.

According to Charles Hoskinson, it won’t have direct consequences for the "average Cardano user." We’re making network improvements, consensus improvements, and we’re updating important changes to the Plutus language", says the Cardano chief, who calls Vasil the "largest and most significant hard fork to date."

Cardano Flips the Switch

Users won’t be left empty-handed, though. The upgrade will "increase Cardano’s throughput," Hoskinson explains, and will optimize the system for DeFi, smart contracts, and DEXes (decentralized exchanges). In the end, this will benefit all Cardano users.

"Roughly speaking, smart contracts will be more efficient and cheaper," notes Cardano developer Lars Brünjes. The smart contracts "will require less memory and thus incur lower transaction costs." A win-win: "For users, it’s faster and cheaper, and for developers, more options to write even more powerful smart contracts that do more," the mathematician says.

And then?

Vasil is a major piece of the Basho puzzle, but certainly not the last. Sidechains are being expanded to move more tokens and boost Cardano’s interoperability with other networks. The other focus is on the layer-2 Hydra solution. Hydra, referencing the multi-headed monster from Greek myth, enables parallel transaction execution without straining the mainnet. "The rough idea" behind it is that transactions aren’t executed on the blockchain, but off-chain, so to speak, Brünjes says.

After the scalability wave, Cardano will eventually reach its final phase: the Voltaire era, where control of the network gradually shifts to the users. This phase focuses on governance, giving users more rights to have a say. There’s still a lot to do, and there will probably be a few more hard forks before the final Cardano emerges.