Cardano (ADA) Delays Network Upgrade Until End of July

The "Vasil Hard Fork" originally scheduled to launch June 29 has been postponed.

In a blog post on Monday, the Input Output Global (IOG) team behind the programming of the Cardano blockchain announced that despite initial success of its "Vasil Hard Fork" upgrade earlier this month on the project's test network -- they're delaying the actual launch to users by several weeks.

Technical glitches during testing trigger delay

"The 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 'severe.' After some consideration, we have agreed NOT to send the hard fork update proposal to the testnet today to allow more time for testing," the official blog post states.

The Vasil upgrade has been touted as the most important development for the platform since it added smart contract functionality in September of last year. Smart contracts are small bits of code that enable automated blockchain transactions without oversight from people. The Vasil coding improvement is expected to boost the efficacy, efficiency, and scalability of the Cardano network -- just not as quickly as the team had hoped.

"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," the statement reads.

Launched in 2017, Cardano's proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus method to confirm blockchain transactions is generally believed to use less energy resources, making it a better option for the environment, compared to the proof-of-work (PoW) model. Several of the most-used crypto networks still rely on PoW, including Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Dogecoin.

Is Caradano a buy?

As of this writing, Cardano's native token ADA was up half a percentage point, priced at $0.49 per coin on cryptocurrency exchanges, marking an 84% drop from its peak price of $3.10 set on Sept. 2, 2021.

This is not financial advice and investors should only invest what they can afford to lose, always researching every investment first. However, it's my opinion that Cardano is a solid project that's being built to last. Once its technical roadmap is finally deployed, the Cardano blockchain will be one of the most reliable and robust platforms within the crypto sector.