Vasil introduction

Note: New dedicated preview and pre-production environments have been recently spun up for the final stages of testing Vasil functionality. These environments offer improved chain density and a better developer experience.

We recommend that all developers, SPOs, and exchanges use these environments rather than the main Cardano testnet. For more details, see environments overview.

Vasil enforces the next major upgrade to the Cardano protocol using Cardano’s hard fork combinator (HFC) approach. This upgrade is named after a much loved and respected Cardano community member, Vasil St Dabov.

Vasil brings changes that improve the handling of on-chain (Plutus) scripts, reducing user costs and allowing greater script throughput. Vasil changes form the first stages of a series of planned improvements that will be rolled out over time.

More specifically, this upgrade introduces:

  • Diffusion pipelining
  • Plutus V2 (a tuned interpreter, and a new cost model)
  • New Plutus built-ins
  • Plutus reference inputs
  • Plutus inline datums
  • Plutus reference scripts
  • Collateral change address
  • Transaction redeemers changes
  • Single VRF implementation

To get started, make sure to:

Also, note that:

  • With the Vasil hard fork on mainnet, the d parameter is removed and block production is now fully decentralized. This prevents re-federation.
  • If you are an SPO, you now need to create your operational certificate using cold.counter +1. The OpCert must be exactly one more than the previously used one. See details here
  • The minUTxO formula is now calculated using original bytes instead of lovelacePerUTxOWord. For more details, see CIP-55.

Feedback

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