Updated Cardano SPOs produce 42% of new blocks

• Financial

Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), the blockchain company behind the Cardano network, says the long-awaited Vasil hard fork is “inching closer” after revealing three critical indicators that will trigger the mainnet update.

In a Twitter post on August 25, IOHK shared with its 265,800 followers its latest “launch status” of the Vasil upgrade, with updates on the “three critical mass indicators” that will determine when the mainnet update will go live.

This includes 75% of the mainnet blocks produced by nodes running version 1.35.3, around 25 upgraded exchanges (representing 80% of liquidity), as well as the top ten core mainnet Dapps that also need to be upgraded. On Thursday, the blockchain company noted that Stake Pool Operators (SPOs) running the latest 1.35.3 nodes now account for 42% of the mainnet's block production, which is now more than halfway to the required 75%.

Binance upgraded its Cardano nodes to the latest version

IOHK also noted that one of the world's largest exchanges, Binance, has reportedly upgraded its Cardano nodes to the latest version. The company targeted approximately 25 exchanges to upgrade its nodes, as this would account for approximately 80% of the total liquidity of Cardano tokens.

As for its mainnet decentralized applications (DApps), IOHK has confirmed that it will continue to support the development of many DApps on Cardan, and four of the top ten decentralized applications have already confirmed that they are actively testing on node 1.35.3.

IOHK also shared that no new bugs have been identified, leaving nine minor bugs still to be addressed, none of which will cause an inadvertent hard fork. The long-awaited Vasil hard fork is aimed at reducing transaction size and enabling more network activity while reducing costs.

After IOHK published a roadmap on May 19 that planned a hard fork on June 29, the Vasil upgrade has been plagued by delays like almost all major upgrades in the crypto sector. But that's to be expected considering that the technology is new, and it's about user funds that the developers want to secure as much as possible.