Cardano’s founder Charles Hoskinson has announced a new timeline for the deployment of the Vasil hard fork upgrade, anticipating that the mainnet upgrade will go live in September if everything goes according to plan.

Development Is Progressing Swiftly

In a Friday Twitter Livestream from Colorado, Charles Hoskinson shared a brief update on the Vasil upgrade. According to Hoskinson, the development of the much-anticipated hard fork is going on swiftly. 

Hoskinson explained that IOHK developers and the community are still conducting thorough tests on the Vasil hard fork and the integration work and infrastructure are looking fine. 

According to PoolTool, Cardano Stake Pool Operators (SPOs) running the latest 1.35.3 now account for 55% of mainnet block production, more than half of the 75% needed before the mainnet is hard forked.

When Is the Vasil Upgrade?

Hoskinson adds that there are no major bugs on the mainnet, only small bugs in the backlog. He also clarified that none of the small bugs are hard fork blockers capable of delaying the mainnet.

With this, Hoskinson estimates the upgrade will take place “sometime in September,” unless the development sees a major slowdown.

When the goal of 75% SPOs is hit and three to five of the major exchanges by volume have upgraded their Cardano nodes (Binance has already upgraded) to the latest version, then the date for the Vasil upgrade will be announced.

On the Flipside

• The timeline puts the Vasil deployment very close to the Ethereum mainnet merge and could receive less attention if Ethereum launches first.

Why You Should Care

The Vasil hard fork aims to add four Cardano Improvement Proposals (CIPs) to increase throughput, reduce transaction cost, and improve the development of smart contracts and decentralized apps (dApps).