Vasil releases Plutus v2: Vasil Hard Fork, an updated version of Cardano’s language for writing scripts for smart contracts.
The much-anticipated Vasil hard fork will happen on the main network of the Cardano blockchain on Thursday, September 22. This is a backward-incompatible upgrade that is meant to improve smart contracts, increase the chain’s throughput, and lower costs.
Cardano’s smart contract language is called Plutus. Vasil will send out Plutus version (v)2, the second version of Cardano’s scripting language. As the base layer of Cardano, Plutus does a good job of separating the code that runs smart contracts, which stays off-chain and runs on a user’s computer, from the code that validates transactions on the blockchain. One epoch after Thursday’s hard fork, which is expected to happen on Sept. 27, the new Plutus v2 features will be available.
Cardano is sometimes criticized because its smart contract features aren’t as good as those of Ethereum and other layers one blockchains, which have thriving communities for decentralized finance (DeFi). Unlike Ethereum, which works like a bank account, Cardano is based on Bitcoin’s “unspent transaction output” (UTXO) system. This is a way to figure out what users have in their wallets by keeping track of how much change is left over after coins are spent.
Vasil’s changes to the Cardano ledger will make it possible for scripting contracts to use inputs and UTXOs without spending them. In other words, it makes it possible to access information stored on the blockchain without spending and making new UTXOs, which was the case before. By changing how reference scripts are handled, the size of transactions that run them can be cut by a large amount. Before, this caused processing delays.
Cardano extends Bitcoin’s accounting system to handle smart contracts. These contracts, called “extended unspent transaction outputs” (EUTXO), are meant to keep as much functionality as possible off the blockchain. This is a key feature for both scaling and reducing the chances of attacks and security breaches.
“Some people think of blockchains as platforms, game engines, databases, and other things that can be fully programmed. But they aren’t really. “They are ledgers that keep track of transactions,” said Matthias Benkort, the technical director of Cardano. So, he said, it’s important for security and auditing to limit the number of critical on-chain executions.
Other changes after Vasil will include “diffusion pipelining,” which doesn’t require a hard fork but will speed up Cardano and make it easier to scale. It does this by reducing the idle time by spreading blocks before they’re fully validated, while still validating their headers.
A blog post says that this scaling upgrade will make it easier for network participants to share information about newly created blocks by making sure that blocks can be spread across the network well within five seconds of being created.
