Will the Cardano Vasil Upgrade Be More Effective than the ETH Merge Update?

Cardano Vasil upgrade finally went live around 3am this morning. Through a recent update on Twitter by the company backing Cardano, Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) mentioned that within 48 hours, 13 cryptocurrency exchanges confirmed their readiness for the hard fork, with regard to 87% of Cardano's (ADA) liquidity. Among all the exchanges which deals in ADA liquidity, Coinbase is considered the only exchange which is making progress regarding its integration status, as per an ecosystem readiness page by IOHK. However, a recent tweet by Coinbase has mentioned that it will support the fork, with ADA transactions reportedly going through maintenance for the Cardano Vasil hard fork.

"#Vasil mainnet HFC event successful! We're happy to announce that today, at 21:44:00 UTC, the IOG team, in collaboration with the @CardanoStiftung, successfully hard forked the Cardano mainnet via an HFC event, thus deploying new #Vasil features to the chain," said the company in its tweet.

However, the new capabilities for developers will be only available on Sept. 27, one epoch later. Vasil is part of Cardano's third development cycle and is considered the most extensive upgrade attempted for Cardano to date. The upgrade is expected to reduce transaction fees, increase speed and improve decentralized application (dApp) development.

"Vasil will enhance Cardano's smart contract capabilities through Plutus V2, which adds greater efficiency to an already powerful smart contract platform," said Cardano Foundation CEO Frederik Gregaard in an interview with Decrypt. "Ultimately, it will reduce script execution costs and transaction size, plus improve throughput," he added.