Cardano follows the general sentiment in the market and records a slight recovery during today’s trading session. If Bitcoin and larger cryptocurrencies managed to extend the bullish momentum, ADA seems poised to benefit.
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At the time of writing, ADA’s price trades at $0.45 with a 2% profit in the last 24 hours. Over the last 7 days, Cardano remains in the red with a 6% loss.
The company behind Cardano’s development Input-Output Global (IOG) successfully forked the network’s testnet. An “important” step in the upcoming deployment of the Vasil upgrade on the mainnet.
The company called on to stakepool operators, exchange platforms, and other actors to “commence their final testing and integration processes”. One month from now, Cardano will launch Vasil on its mainnet and will complete one of its most important milestones for 2022.
According to IOG, Vasil will provide Cardano with “significant performance and capability upgrades”. The network will be able to increase its performance and throughput by providing developers with a “better experience”.
In addition, the network will become more interoperable and with new functionalities, such as an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) that will facilitate the task of migrating an ERC20 token to Cardano. This could open the door for new decentralized applications (dApps) and protocols to be launched on the network. IOG said:
The Vasil upgrade is the most ambitious program of work we’ve undertaken. And the whole community is involved. Our prime concern is ensuring we manage this upgrade in a way that is safe and secure.
Still, it might take some time before these dApps grow while developers launch tools and allow users to interact with them. However, the long-term bullish potential is expanding at a face pace. On this topic, developer Sebastian Guillemot said:
One challenge with this is although they will now be supported at the protocol level, it will take some time for the tooling around these to be built. Notably, it will require some large change in how wallets handle tokens.
Cardano Founders On Their 2022 Priority
As the network advances to the Vasil upgrade, Charles Hoskinson, CEO at IOG, spoke about the work happening behind the scenes. 2022 has been a year dedicated to adoption, improvement scalability, and expanding the dApp ecosystem.
In that sense, Hoskinson spoke about the importance of the recent network updates including the Alonzo Hard Fork. The results are already tangible, according to the inventor of Cardano, and will continue with Vasil:
the work we’ve put in is showing – we’ve got a rapidly growing dApp and vibrant NFT ecosystem, with currently over 1,000 projects building on Cardano (…). It’s always difficult to define one key moment but the Vasil hard fork is pretty significant.
Once these improvements fall into place, IOG will turn its eye to governance. As Hoskinson said, they will still work on updating the network, but “each year has a theme”.
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Ultimately, Hoskinson said, the network will achieve its potential by providing real-world value and use cases to the users. This goes hand in hand with having a “clear” roadmap despite the criticism about delays from certain users:
We have always pursued a defined, clearly-staged roadmap to deliver on Cardano’s capability and fulfil its long-term potential.