Cardano is up 27% today, in anticipation of the long-awaited Vasil hardfork update, which is slated to debut in June.
Cardano, which has surpassed Ripple to become the sixth-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, is among the greatest gainers in the global crypto market which saw a small relief rally.
Cardano now has a market value of about $21.7 billion, whereas XRP has a market capitalization of $20.2 billion. ADA has gained about 25% from it’s intraday low, while XRP has gained little more than 5%. Prices have now retraced little, but ADA has maintained its position.
The rise comes before the much-anticipated Vasil hard fork upgrade, which is intended to enhance throughput and efficiency on the network. The Vasil testnet will go live on June 2, followed by the mainnet launch on June 29.
During the market downturn, the Cardano ecosystem has grown, with over 5 million native assets now created on the Cardano blockchain, more than twice the level seen at the end of last year.
There are now 5.01 million native assets minted on Cardano with over 54,800 policies. Minting policies are a “set of rules that govern the minting and burning of assets scoped under that policy,” according to Cardano’s documentation.
The Vasil update will be the biggest substantial change to the network since the Alonzo hard fork in September 2021, which enabled Cardano smart contracting capabilities and opened up a slew of new DeFi use cases.
The planned Vasil hardfork is expected to improve the network’s scalability and usability. Vasil will feature four Cardano Improvement Proposals, CIP31, CIP32, CIP33, and CIP40, which are meant to rethink how Cardano’s Plutus scripts are sent to the blockchain.
The CIP enhancements are anticipated to reduce transaction costs, increase network throughput and decentralization, and resolve the so-called “concurrency” problem, which has severely limited the scalability of blockchain apps to date.