Bugs in the system push Cardano’s Vasil hard fork back to late July
Cardano’s much-anticipated Vasil hard fork – due to be implemented tomorrow – has been postponed while engineers work to fix several bugs.
Branded as one of the defining moments of 2022 by Cardano’s mastermind – Input Output Global chief Charles Hoskinson – the Vasil hard fork is designed to deliver a slew of upgrades to network capacity and Cardano’s smart contract programming language Plutus, which enables Cardano decentralised application (dApp) development.
However, the IOG core team working on Vasil – named after the late Bulgarian mathematician Vasil Dabov, encountered what they describe as seven ‘non-severe’ bugs that need to be fixed before the update proposal is sent to the testnet. Boffins working on the upgrade said they were 95 per cent of the way to completion of Vasil before making the decision to postpone.
Nigel Hemsley, head of Delivery and Projects at IO Global, said the work on Vasil had been the most complex program of development and integration to date.
“It’s a challenging process that requires not only significant work from core teams, but also close coordination across the ecosystem. IOG and the Cardano Foundation have agreed a new target date to hard fork the testnet at the end of June,” he explained.
“Once completed, we will then allow four weeks for exchanges and SPOs to carry out any required integration and testing work. The working assumption should therefore now be a Cardano mainnet hard fork occurring during the last week of July.”
Hemsley stressed that quality and security must remain paramount over delivering on specific date.
“If more time is needed to get the core code right – and ensure all ecosystem players (SPOs, dApp projects, tools, exchanges, etc) are fully comfortable – so be it,” he said.
“Giving the process longer is the only responsible thing to do. We now have some 35 developers from across 27 projects testing their dApps and helping identify any issues, along with 16 stake pool operators (SPOs) supporting.
“The IOG and Cardano Foundation teams will continue to work closely with the developer community and exchanges as we draw closer to the Vasil hard fork on mainnet.”