Cardano's Vasil Hardfork upgrade has deployed successfully! Find out what this means for Cardano

Cardano's newest upgrade in the Basho (scaling) era is the Vasil upgrade, named after the late Bulgarian mathematician Vasil Dabov who was a respected member of the Cardano community.

What does the Vasil upgrade do?

The key component of the upgrade is to make Cardano's transaction sizes smaller. In layman's terms, previous transactions were filled with some fluff which bogged down the available space in each block. With the Vasil upgrade, each transaction takes up less space and therefore more of them can fit into blocks. This also makes running different types of Smart Contracts a lot easier than before, which was one of the main complaints from developers.

This is because of 'reference scripts' where a transaction can include a reference to a script on a previous transaction, thus preventing the same code being written into multiple transactions.

It's important to note that while the upgrade was executed without issue, it's because of extensive testing. Earlier this Summer, a critical flaw was found and it was uncertain whether it could be fixed in time for the previously scheduled deployment of the Vasil upgrade.

One more thing to remember is that this won't be a snap-of-the-fingers speed upgrade for Cardano, the Smart Contract developers must also upgrade their code too - however, a majority of developers have already signaled readiness for the Vasil hard fork so we should see some good improvements soon.

And to get in before everyone else (phrasing), yes, the Vasil hardfork is like adding Vasiline to the Cardano network. I'll see myself out!