Despite all its ups and downs – despite its cyclical (albeit “ever up the mountain”) gains and losses – one thing you can absolutely always count on with Cardano is that there will be delays.
The most recent delay, of course, is the upcoming Cardano Vasil hardfork. The network upgrade was originally slated for a week from now, but that June 29 launch has been pushed back to the last week in July.
Input Output Global (formerly Input Output Hong Kong, or IOHK) announced the delay on its developer blog earlier this week:
“The IOG engineering team is extremely close to finalizing the core work, with just seven bugs still outstanding to complete the hard fork work, with none currently ranked as ‘severe’. After some consideration, we have agreed NOT to send the hard fork update proposal to the testnet today to allow more time for testing. …
The work on Vasil has been the most complex program of development and integration to date, from several angles. It’s a challenging process that requires not only significant work from core teams, but also close coordination across the ecosystem.”
While the end of July is considered to be a reasonable timeframe to get Vasil rolled out, there’s no guarantee that there won’t be further delays.
There very well could be, especially since the following three prerequisites for going live – again, as outlined by IOHK and repeated here verbatim – are non-negotiable:
- No critical issues outstanding on node (including ledger, CLI, consensus, etc.) or our internal audit function,
- Benchmarking and performance-cost analysis is acceptable, and
- Community (including exchanges and DApp projects) has been properly informed and has had sufficient time to prepare for the hard fork combinator event.
At the end of the post, the Cardano developer – perhaps a bit unnecessarily – explains why the delay was needed:
“We recognize that this news will be disappointing to some. However, we are taking an abundance of caution to ensure that we do this deployment correctly.
As we have consistently communicated, and most in the community recognizes, no timelines can be absolute in software development. Quality and security must remain paramount. If more time is needed to get the core code right – and ensure all ecosystem players (SPOs, DApp projects, tools, exchanges, etc.) are fully comfortable – so be it. Giving the process longer is the only responsible thing to do.”
Now, obviously, IOG will get no complaints out of us for this move. IOG isn’t in the habit of vacillating, despite not Vasil-ating, as it were. (It’s early. Leave me alone.)
First off, we’re used to Cardano delays. And it’s not just Cardano. Any noteworthy and legitimate crypto development roadmap is peppered with delays as a matter of course.
We get that.
Put another way, we’re content to wait for Metroid Prime 4 (no doubt intended as a launch title for the Switch 2 VR) while many others were more excited – and then summarily quite a lot less excited – to play Cyberpunk 2077 on day one.
Of course, the vidya analogy is superficial because – outside of streamers and eSports pros – nobody’s counting on those software releases to make them actual money or to be the foundational basis for an entirely new economy.
With crypto, the stakes are higher.
Frankly, crypto development delays are only a problem if they take a piece of extant software and turn its future into a never-ending hypefest of vaporware.
It’s no cause for alarm if a developer frequently delays its various network upgrades. The real red flag is if the delays are endless and if the initiative languishes for months or even years on end.
If some hifalutin crypto concept gets kicked out the door before it’s ready – or if the team behind it was ambitious beyond its own capabilities – you’d be wise to dump the effort after a reasonable grace period.
By all means, these developers must prove themselves by sticking with the plan. Even if improvements trickle out, that’s fine – as long as they keep trickling out.
Otherwise, you run into this kind of nonsense from Cardano’s biggest “rival”:
“Solend, the largest lending market on Solana is about to have a crippling liquidation of $170m SOL that could crash the network. To prevent this, the decentralized protocol is proposing to seize the user’s funds via governance”
Seriously, this is real.
Here’s the scandal in question, as explained by u/Set1Less (all sics intact):
“There is a large liquidation watch on Solana’s Solend protocol, where a whale has deposited 5.7M SOL ($170M and borrowed 108M USDC and USDT borrowed. This alone accounts for a huge % of borrowing on Solana, and now this position is under a liquidation threat.
The whale is not closing their position. In most protocols like Compound, or AAVE, Maker etc, this will result in an onchain liquidation. Infact we have seen many such large liquidations on AAVE And Maker recently, and everything has worked as expected.
However such a large liquidation in an illiquid market and unstable network like Solana is likely to have vastly damaging consequences. Solana network has already gone down and halted half a dozen time.”
In response, the fine folks at Solend – being the champions of decentralization that they are – are proposing this as a solution:
“Grant emergency power to Solend Labs to temporarily take over the whale’s account so the liquidation can be executed OTC and avoid pushing Solana to its limits. This would be done via a smart contract upgrade. Emergency powers will be revoked once the whale’s account reaches a safe level.”
If theft is your solution to fix your financial network, you’ve messed up the bed worse than that celebrity woman from the trial.
As u/Set1Less sums up:
“When shit starts to implode, all the true colors of decentralization comes out.
These shitty protocol are run by fly by night cowboys who learnt basics of economics during the bull run. They put their users are risk by running terrible protocols that do not think about all the edge cases…because who cares about risks right?!
And during signs of distress, they resolve to seize user funds.”
Bad crypto concepts, bad code, and a lack of adequate forethought about potential outlier scenarios is a recipe for disaster. It’s why reputable blockchains like Cardano consistently delay new features and upgrades, and it’s why you can feel confident in the project.
It’s why ADA is still the best investment in crypto.
So, you know, buy the dip.