Cardano's Vasil Upgrade Is Delayed Again for More Testing

Input Output (IOG), the development lab for the Cardano blockchain, said a planned network upgrade has been pushed back by a few more weeks.

"There could be a few more weeks from where we are before we go to the actual Vasil hard fork,” Kevin Hammond, IOG technical manager, said in a monthly update call Thursday. Testing for “inevitable issues” was taking place and any problems were being fixed by the development team.

“All users have to be ready to progress through the hard fork to make sure the smooth process, both for them and end users of the Cardano blockchain,” Hammond said.

Vasil, an upgrade designed to increase Cardano's scaling capabilities, had been scheduled for a June release on a test network followed by its introduction on the main network. A hard fork is a backward-incompatible change to the software used to validate and produce new blocks.

The team had earlier flagged seven bugs that prevented developers from releasing Vasil as planned in June. “This puts us behind schedule on our previously communicated target date of June 29 for a mainnet hard fork,” they said at the time.

The final decision to upgrade the Cardano testnet will be made in consultation with the network’s decentralized application (dapp) development community. Before that, developers must clear any critical issues in testing, conduct benchmarking tests and inform the broader developer community to allow enough time to test their dapps before the hard fork is implemented.

Cardano’s ADA tokens have gained 7.7% in the past 24 hours amid a market-wide recovery.