$ADA: Great Collaboration Between IOG and Cardano SPOs Has Everyone Feeling Very Confident About Upcoming Vasil Hard Fork

Testing by Cardano stake pool operators (SPOs) in a new mixed-node testnet created by the IOG on Friday (August 19) seems to suggest that release candiate 1.35.3 is good to go, and all that remains is for at least 75% of SPOs to upgrade their mainnet nodes to this version.

Below is a brief recap of the events — related to the testing of release 1.35.3 — that took place in the past few days. This is based on information in Twitter and a fantastic video by Adam Wesberg, who is an Android developer, as well as an SPO (“Blue Cheese St₳ke House”).

Last week, some community members — including Adam Dean (who is a former SPO, as well as co-founder of Buffy Bot Publishing) and Andrew Wesberg, expressed their desire for more testing of release 1.35.3, which fixed a critical defect found in release 1.35.2. IOG throughly tested release 1.35.3 and felt that SPOs should upgrade their mainnet nodes to this release as soon as they could so that Vasil does not get delayed any further.

The problem with release 1.35.2 was that under certain conditions (“bad minfee”), it would accept an invalid transaction. The good news is that both release 1.34.1 (which around 60% of SPOs are running on the mainnet as of 6:10 p.m. UTC on August 21) and Vasil release candidate 1.35.3, which is the latest version of the Cardano Node software, reject such an invalid transaction (with a “fee too low” error).

These concerned 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.

As the result of the hard work of these community members, the IOG, and other interested community members, a new public testnet (called “Mixed” or “YoloNet” depending on whom you ask, although the latter seems to be more popular) was created on August 19, and SPOs began running their tests in this mixed-node environment.

The screenshot below is from Wesberg’s YouTube video, and it shows the test plan the community came up with:

So far, many SPOs have used this new testnet, and they are reporting that all is well.

On Monday (August 21), a Vasil hard fork combinator (HCF) event is expected to take place on this testnet, and if — as everyone expects — there are no issues, it seems highly likely that those SPOs who have not already upgraded to release 1.35.3 on the mainnet will make the move to release 1.35.3, and of course, once 75% of stake pool nodes on the mainnet are on 1.35.3, the Vasil HCF can happen. As of 6:30 p.m. UTC on August 21, according to Cardano PoolTool, at least 26% of SPOs have upgraded their mainnet nodes to 1.35.3.

This means that there is a decent chance we will see the Vasil HCF on the Cardano mainnet before the end of this month.

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