Earlier this week, Duncan Coutts, who is Technical Architect for Cardano at Input Output Global (\u201cIOG\u201d), the company responsible for Cardano\u2019s research and development, talked about this month\u2019s upcoming Vasil upgrade (aka \u201cVasil hard fork\u201d and \u201cVasil Hard Fork Combinator event\u201d).<\/p>\n
According to his IOG bio, Coutts is \u201ca computer scientist and a Haskell consultant and community member\u201d who holds a PhD in computer science and has been using Haskell for nearly 20 years. He is also \u201cthe founding partner of the Well-Typed consultancy, where he has spent a decade helping a variety of customers build applications in Haskell and making improvements to the language\u2019s programming tools.\u201d Coutts began working with IOG in 2016, and is \u201cthe head of engineering on the Cardano project.\u201d<\/p>\n
As you may know, on June 20, Nigel Hemsley, Head of Delivery & Projects at IOG, published a blog post titled \u201cVasil upgrade \u2013 the state of play\u201d.<\/p>\n
Hemsley wrote:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe IOG engineering team is extremely close to finalizing the core work, with just seven bugs still outstanding to complete the hard fork work, with none currently ranked as \u2018severe\u2019. After some consideration, we have agreed NOT to send the hard fork update proposal to the testnet today to allow more time for testing\u2026<\/p>\n
\u201cTo date, we\u2019ve managed to get through the majority (approx 95%) of our Plutus V2 test scripts. However, we still have a few outstanding items that we need to run to confirm everything is working as expected. We have determined we\u2019ll need a few more days for this. This puts us behind schedule on our previously communicated target date of June 29 for a mainnet hard fork\u2026<\/p>\n
\u201cToday, IOG and the Cardano Foundation have agreed a new target date to hard fork the testnet at the end of June. Once completed, we will then allow four weeks for exchanges and SPOs to carry out any required integration and testing work. This is only reasonable and should not be rushed. The working assumption should therefore now be a Cardano mainnet hard fork occurring during the last week of July.\u201c<\/p>\n
A short time afterwards, the IOG CEO made a 15-minute video to share his thoughts on the Vasil upgrade delay.<\/p>\n
Hoskinson said:<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re pretty close to the target. We\u2019re code complete, and what code complete effectively means is you probably could flip the switch and get away with it, and certain projects would do that, but what happened after the collapse of Terra (LUNA) is that I gave a directive to a lot of engineers to say we should probably measure three times and cut once given the nature of things.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cAnd so, additional tests were added in the Plutus suite and additional work was done for QA above and beyond what we normally do for hard forks. So, that was one dimension of the puzzle that made it more complicated.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cThe other dimension of the puzzle was that after Consensus we did have an enormous amount of contact with dApp developers and other people, and there was a desire to be a bit more inclusive in the QA process and the testing process. A lot of them said \u2018hey, we need several weeks on testnet to be able to play around with these things\u2019. And at the end of the day, this is not a hard fork for the average Cardano user. The Vasil hard fork has always been a hard fork specifically for dApp developers.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cIt speeds up the transaction rate with pipelining. And then all the CIPs are basically there to make Plutus smart contracts easier to write. If you\u2019re a developer, whether you\u2019re doing it on the mainnet or the testnet, you should have the same development environment in that respect.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cSo what\u2019s more meaningful to the community, frankly, is making sure that the testnet runs Vasil so that people who are building dAps on Cardano can deploy those dApps\u2026 We don\u2019t anticipate that this July date is going to in any way impact the actual rollout of all the dApps have been waiting for Vasil because now they have a testing environment to do that.<\/em>..<\/p>\n \u201cJuly is not too far off, you know, and all things considered, it\u2019s kind of in an acceptable zone in my view. It\u2019s a little frustrating because I really wanted to make sure that we got something in June, but getting it on the testnet I think is good enough for the developers because they\u2019re the primary constituent here, and that\u2019s not going to slow down ecosystem growth.<\/em>\u201c<\/p>\n https:\/\/youtube.com\/watch?v=fxWfdd2MJOc%3Ffeature%3Doembed<\/p>\n Well, on Tuesday (July 5), journalist Darren Parkin at City A.M. published an interesting interview with Duncan Coutts. <\/p>\n When asked about the Vasil upgrade, which is expected to go live on the Cardano mainnet by the end of this month, Coutts had this to say:<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re thrilled about the Vasil upgrade, and we hard forked the Cardano Testnet on Monday this week in preparation.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cAlthough \u2018hard fork\u2019 is probably a misleading term when talking about how we do updates. IOG\u2019s unique hard fork combinator means Cardano continues through the hard fork without a \u201cbreak\u201d, and that there\u2019s no need to stop block production \u2013 this ensures smooth upgrades to the network. There\u2019s no core network disruption. It\u2019s a rather special piece of technology.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cThe Basho era of the Cardano roadmap is all about optimizing and scaling Cardano to better support Defi applications and facilitate growth and adoption, and the Vasil enhancements are a key element. With over 1000 projects building on Cardano and counting, and\u00a0over five million native tokens\u00a0created on the blockchain, we want to make sure we\u2019re preparing for Cardano\u2019s growth appropriately. The improvements that Vasil is making to Cardano\u2019s scalability are a critical part of preparing for continuing growth.<\/em><\/p>\n