Cardano Delays Vasil Upgrade: Here's What Happened

Major proof-of-stake blockchain Cardano ADA/USD delayed its next major upgrade after finding multiple bugs in the code that need ironing out. Here's what to expect from the upcoming upgrade.

What Happened: Input-Output Hong Kong (IOHK) — the firm behind the Cardano software — announced on Monday the Vasil hard fork was delayed after seven bugs could not be sorted out before the testnet upgrade scheduled for that day.

None of these bugs are severe, but the team will need a "few more days" and will not be able to meet the previously announced June 29 mainnet hard fork deadline. No more details concerning the bugs were provided.

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IOHK's team is seemingly mostly pleased with the quality of work on the upgrade considering it purportedly meets its three requirements: lacking critical issues in the code, acceptable benchmarking and performance-cost analysis results, and the community had enough time to prepare for the upgrade.

What's Next: According to Cardano's official development forums, Vasil will introduce the following Cardano Improvement Proposals (CIP): CIP-31 (Reference Inputs), CIP-32 (Inline Datums), CIP-33 (Reference Scripts) and CIP-40 (Collateral Outputs).

CIP-31 allows developers to reference an input from a script stored directly on-chain and CIP-33 makes transactions smaller and cheaper while also enabling reference to pre-recorded scripts from other transactions. CIP-32 allows datums themselves to be attached to outputs instead of datum hashes, said the report. This will allow much simpler communication of datum values between users. Lastly, CIP-40 introduces collateral requirements when submitting transactions that use Plutus — Cardano's smart contract platform — to prevent distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

Why It Matters: Denial of service (DoS) is a kind of attack which sees malicious actors send so many requests to servers that they are overloaded and end up going offline. DDoS is a variant of this attack that is distributed, meaning it originates from many nodes on a given network as opposed to just one. This has become true for the near totality of DoS attacks since modern hardware capabilities and cybersecurity practices made simple DoS attacks useless in the vast majority of cases.

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