Updates are the future

No digital technology can do without a team that fixes bugs and brings major improvements from time to time. Blockchain is a technology and it needs to be improved, as only increasing efficiency, new capabilities, and reducing costs for users will bring long-term success in the form of wider adoption. This is true for both the current IT giants and for blockchain technology, which came into the world more than 10 years ago as very inefficient. If a blockchain network is one day to be used by hundreds of millions of users per day, continued innovation is essential.

Cardano is designed to be able to innovate regularly without interruption. Cardano is a global network, so it is not possible to temporarily shut it down to update the network. The team has found a way to make updates while not impacting the use of the network. They created a hard-fork combinator tool to do this. The hard-fork combinator allows updates to be deployed without restricting usage. Users won’t even notice that the improvements have been deployed. However, they can start using them immediately.

The Vasil upgrade brings significant performance and capability enhancements to the Cardano protocol. The upgrade is included in Cardano node version 1.35.0 and the network is getting ready for that. The most important improvement in the Vasil upgrade is mainly Diffusion pipelining, which will affect better scalability. There are also several CIPs (Cardano Improvement Proposal) that are related to the Plutus platform.

Diffusion pipelining

Diffusion pipelining streamlines the propagation of information about newly produced blocks among participants in a Peer-to-Peer network. This enhancement allows the distribution of block information before the block is fully validated on a node. This makes it possible to parallelize block validation and distribution.

The throughput of the network can be made more efficient by increasing the block size and decreasing the interval at which new blocks are created. More information, for example, transactions, can be inserted into a larger block. The more frequently blocks are created, the more user requests will be processed in a given time.

Increasing block size and decreasing block time have limitations due to the capabilities of the Internet. Cardano is a global network with nodes all over the world. If a node creates a new block in, for example, Europe, the block must gradually make its way through other nodes to Asia, South and North America, Australia, and other places. Each individual node validates the information before it can distribute it further to its peers. This means that some time called Delay elapses before the block reaches at least 95% of the nodes in the network. This time is at most 5 seconds in a Cardano network. Delay set to 5 seconds is the time needed to guarantee the propagation of a block whose size does not exceed 2 MB.