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:
- upgrade your node configuration, topology, and genesis files
- check the 'Getting started' tutorial
- see Vasil testnet tutorials
- see Babbage script examples
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 oflovelacePerUTxOWord
. For more details, see CIP-55.
Feedback
We welcome feedback on any issues you have encountered:
- Via Discord channels for general questions or discussions.
- Via the Cardano node issue tracker for any bugs or feature requests in the node. Please tag them as Vasil-related.
- Via the Plutus issue tracker for any bugs or feature requests with Plutus.
- Via IOG technical support desk.
You can also join 'IO DEV announcements' Telegram channel to receive key development updates.