$ADA: Cardano SPOs Celebrate Successful Vasil Hard Fork on the YoloNet Testnet

On Tuesday (August 23), a giant step on the road to Cardano’s Vasil upgrade on the mainnet was taken.

On 10 December 2021, Charles Hoskinson, Co-Founder and CEO of Input Output Global (“IOG”), the company responsible for Cardano’s research and development, explained that he was going to honour his Bulgarian friend and Cardano ambassador Vasil Stoyanov Davov — who sadly passed away in his apartment in Plovdiv, Bulgaria on 3 December 2021 “after a long combat with pulmonary embolism” — by naming the next hard fork combinator (HFC) event after him. Vasil was an artist, entrepreneur, blockchain consultant, Haskell practioneer, and ginkgologist. Furthermore, it would not be an exaggeration to say that he was a highly beloved and respected member of the Cardano community.

Last Friday (August 19), a new public testnet — initially called “Mixed”, but later renamed to “YoloNet” — was created by Input Output Global (IOG), the blockchain technology company responsible for Cardano’s research and development, and SPOs began testing in this mixed-node environment.

The reason that SPOs asked IOG to create YoloNet was because these community members felt that there should be a new public testnet that simulates the mixed node environment that exists on the mainnet. More specifically, they wanted to make sure that nodes running release 1.34.1, 1.35.2, and 1.35.3 could co-exist and that any “bad minfee” transactions accepted by nodes running release 1.35.2 would not get propagated to any patched nodes in the Cardano network.

Anyway, yesterday, Adam Dean, who is a former SPO, as well as co-founder of Buffy Bot Publishing, reported the wonderful news that a Vasil HFC had occurred on YoloNet (which means that over 75% of nodes on this network must have been running release 1.35.3 since otherwise the HFC would not have been scheduled).

So, what does this mean for the Cardano mainnet?

Well, Dean replied that once 75% of the mainnet nodes are on release 1.35.3, a final HFC test would be done on testnet “Pre-Production” (which tries to mirror the settings of the mainnet as much as possible), and after this an HCF event could be scheduled on the mainnet, something that he expects will happen by early to mid September.

So, once 75% of blocks are being made with 1.35.3 we will schedule a final HFC test on Pre-Production network which attempts to closely mirror main net settings. Once that’s done the HFC can be “scheduled” on mainnet and will go through on the following epoch transition.

— Adam Dean (@adamKDean) August 23, 2022

Given the epoch cycle. I would say early to mid if we can get the community moving. And luckily, the entire community is tuned in and listening for news right now 🙂

— Adam Dean (@adamKDean) August 23, 2022

Currently (as of 11:10 a.m. UTC on August 24), according to Cardano PoolTool’s “Network Health” page, 36% of Cardano mainnet nodes are running release 1.35.3:

Please note that you need to look at the pie chart titled “Blocks Protocol Version” rather than “Nodes Reporting Version” as Rick McCracken, operator of the “Digital Fortress” stake pool and host of YouTube channel “Digital Fortress”, explained in a tweet he posted earlier today:

Of course, Dean was focusing on the Vasil HCF’s node software upgrade requirement. There are, however, two other requirements, as IOG explained in a thread posted on August 12:

3⃣key mainnet #DApps (inc. top ten by TVL) confirming they have upgraded to 1.35.3 on PreProduction and on Mainnet
🧵7/9

— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) August 12, 2022

Image Credit

Featured Image via Pixabay