Cardano Means Business as Vasil Upgrade Ushers in Plutus V2

• The anticipated Vasil upgrade is enhancing Cardano’s smart contract capabilities through Plutus v2.
• The Vasil will see the  EUTXO model pushed to max levels in order to enable faster and more sophisticated DApps.

Just days before the Cardano community hails in the Vasil Upgrade set to commission on 22nd of September as Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano announced.

It has been a rough but successful ride for the responsible teams at  IOG and the Cardano Foundation, SPOs, DApp developers, and exchanges as they worked tirelessly to perform intensive testing and integration efforts, with positive results.

A blog posted by IOHK states that a Hard Fork Combinator will be used to array the Vasil at the protocol level on September 22nd. The Cardano fraternity will be able to put into use new capabilities including node and CLI support for reference inputs, inline datums, reference scripts, and collateral outputs. Additionally, a new Plutus cost model will become available for developers to utilize one epoch later.

It’s been a journey as Cardano continues to develop in a series of eras on a roadmap to see Cardano in its full potential. It started with the Byron era which was the foundation of security and correctness on the blockchain. The send era was the Shelley era which brought about the full transformation into the most decentralized proof-of-stake platform in the world, with almost 3,000 active stake pools.

The Goguen era brought in the introduction of NFTs and multi-asset capability. This led to the formation of the most vibrant NFT community in the crypto space hosting over 6 million distinct native tokens issued to date.

In the same era, the Alonzo upgrade saw Cardano become a direct competitor to Ethereum’s dominance in the space with the introduction of smart contract capability using the Plutus scripting language. The establishment of smart contracts has seen more than 3000 smart contracts build on Cardano.

Plutus script enhancements

The anticipated Vasil upgrade is enhancing Cardano’s smart contract capabilities through Plutus v2. This means greater efficiency in a more dynamic smart contract platform.

The Vasil will see the  EUTXO model pushed to max levels in order to enable faster and more sophisticated DApps. It will be a dream come true for the Cardano community as this is among the enhancements the community has requested via the (CIP) Cardano Improvement Proposal process.

Enhancements in the Plutus V2 Include

Reference inputs(CIP-31)

The addition of reference inputs means that developers will look at the datum without undergoing extra steps. Earlier, in order to access information in this datum, it was necessary to spend the output that the datum was attached to.

Inline datums (CIP-32)

The administration of inline Datums will allow developers to create scripts and attach datums directly to outputs instead of using their hashes. Transaction datums were previously attached to outputs as hashes.

Reference scripts (CIP-33)

In order to reduce the transaction size, improve throughput, and reduces script execution costs the implementation of reference scripts will allow developers to reference a script without including it in each transaction.

The script needs to be paid for once.

Datums and redeemers

Developers will be able to see redeemers for all inputs instead of just the one being passed to the currently executing script.

Data Serialisation primitive. (CIP-42)

This will reduce the overall memory and CPU costs allowing for more optimized and generic ways of data serialization.