Cardano Vasil Hard Fork Report Card: Has the Vasil Upgrade delivered as promised?

On the 22nd of September, the Cardano Vasil Hard Fork went live, and behind the scenes action continued till the 27th of September when all the procedures were finally completed.

🎊 #Vasil deployed!!

Thank you to @CardanoStiftung, @InputOutputHK, #SPOs, and everyone in the #Cardano ecosystem that made it happen! 🎉#CardanoCommunity pic.twitter.com/p4oK2T9FMa

— Cardano Foundation (@Cardano_CF) September 22, 2022

Cardano’s Vasil Hard Fork was the next logical step in its plan to improve upon the speed and scalability of the network. This essentially brings the project another step closer to dethroning the largest smart contract and DeFi platform out there – Ethereum. With this latest upgrade, Cardano’s developers hope to improve the efficiency of smart contracts to make Cardano cheaper and faster to use.

This upgrade will be tackling two of the biggest issues that a blockchain network faces when it become popular and widely used. Network congestion and fees. Ethereum, the largest smart contract platform, is already having a tough time with it, with gas fees skyrocketing beyond all acceptable levels and that is what Cardano is trying to solve and get ahead of. So the Vasil Hard Fork is expected to solve this two pronged issue at once, right after Cardano’s launched its smart contracts capability last year.

Additional read: Cardano Whitepaper Summary

And Cardano has been gaining on other aspects as well. Just a week before the launch of Cardano Vasil Hard Fork, we saw Charles Hoskinson, the co-founder of Input Output Global, sharing a tweet on a report that studied blockchain development rates for all major cryptos out there. The report shows Cardano is at the very top, with over 11% of active GitHub contributors contributing to the Cardano blockchain.

Nothing to see here, folks #Cardano pic.twitter.com/airFmIZS3G

— Dean (@DeansEpoch) September 12, 2022

This is a metric that measures the number of active developers working on the Cardano blockchain and post on GitHub repository. This indicates that a large number Cardano developers have been working consistently in upgrading their technology and adding updates even before the Vasil Hark Fork went live.

This is just one of the major good news that has been coming Cardano’s way. Cardano’s native crypto token, ADA has seen a near 27% increase in its market cap dominance post the Vasil Hard Fork. This is a significant sum as dominance has shot up from its lows back in May 2022, at 1.29% to over 1.63% as of writing. It had even touched highs of 1.9% between June and July 2022.

ADA Dominance | Source: Tradingview

Cardano sees positive fall in Average Transaction Fees

Transaction fees has been one of the focal point of development for most smart contract capable blockchain networks and Cardano’s Vasil Hard Fork was designed to solve for that very problem, as mentioned earlier. And with the Vasil Hard Fork fully underway, it becomes imperative to take a look at how that has been faring since then.

ADA Average Transaction Fees | Source: Messari.io

From the chart above it is clearly evident that average transaction costs over the past month have been steadily declining, with sharp drops towards the end post the implementation of the Cardano Vasil Hard Fork. A drop in average transaction fees would automatically bring in more attention from DeFi application developers and eventually institutional interest in the ecosystem too.

Cardano sees a drop in active address count

But, there are other things to be wary of too. Cardano’s active addresses count has gone down significantly since the beginning of 2022. That is a worrisome sign for any blockchain network, and especially so for a coin that is heralded as the ‘third generation’ of cryptos, after Bitcoin and Ethereum being the first and second respectively.

ADA Active Addresses Count | Source: Messari.io

There has been a small jump towards the end, and going forward if we see a recovery in the overall crypto markets, which has been plagued by a bear run since the beginning of this year – active addresses on the Cardano blockchain network can be expected to recovery with a reasonably high degree of certainty, thanks to all the benefits its provides.

Cardano’s technical structures remain weak

ADA/USD | Source: Tradingview

From a technical perspective, Cardano is in a very precarious position. It is currently stuck in a descending triangle pattern, which is widely known to be a very bearish price pattern. Since the Ethereum Merge, the market has been on a downward slide, Cardano’s native crypto token, ADA has also succumbed to the overall bearishness. 

And to add to that, there was the Relative Strength Index, as of writing, ADA price has broken down strongly, currently running at about 40 and with the price trading below the 50-DMA. Unless we see a very quick recovery back to the top of the trendline resistance (marked in black) and an eventual breakout above that line, things may take a bearish turn in the near future. 

Additional read: Cardano Price Prediction

Conclusion

So overall, Cardano is well positioned to become a very popular blockchain network with a variety of use cases. And currently, with its ability to perform better than most other crypto networks out there, with limited downtimes and decently large number of DeFi projects currently under development – it can act as a fundamentally good recovery candidate if the overall market sentiment improves. We will need a few more weeks of data to properly create a report card on how the Vasil Hark Fork’s positive after effects on the network.

Prices as on 30th September, 2022.