Cardano’s upcoming Chang fork and Plutus V3 update Plutus V3 aims to improve network performance and capabilities but also gives way to governance.
Cardano Upgrade Gives New Utility to Holders. Cardano will soon have a hard fork. With this network upgrade, the system will force nodes to install it to continue operating on Cardano. Chang will enable governance and usher in the fifth phase of network development. Developers named the fork “Chang.” It is scheduled for the first quarter of 2024 and promises to improve the network’s scalability and interoperability. Over the last year, activity on Cardano peaked in May and December.
Cardano Current Status
Cardano is currently the eighth most capitalized cryptocurrency on the market. The project is in the Basho phase, the fourth of its five phases, making the network capable of hosting more users without losing functionality (a quality grouped under the concept of “scalability”) and connecting better and more simply with other networks and interoperability.
Through the Chang fork, Cardano will advance to the next phase, Voltaire, which will mark the transition to full community governance. In that decentralized model, decision-making is distributed among its participants, who must hold ADA, the network’s cryptocurrency, to participate.
In addition, Emurgo, the entity behind the Cardano network, reported in X that development focuses on greater tokenization and promoting the creation of decentralized applications. There are already 150 projects and 1,300 more on the way, they detail.
To this end, the fork will also bring a protocol upgrade called Plutus V3. Chang brings critical improvements to Plutus Core, the functional programming language used to write smart contracts on the network. The new system introduces “Sums of Products” (SOPs) and promises smaller and more efficient scripts, with a possible 30% performance improvement. Scripts are programs or code that represent and execute the logic of smart contracts.
More in detail, Chang will allow Cardano to enrich its cryptography with BLS12-381, Blake2b-224, and Keccak-256. These primitives open the door to advanced implementations, such as sidechains or sidechains. The inclusion of CIP-58 provides developers with capabilities for low-level bit manipulations. From performance to cryptographic support, these primitives improve the efficiency and functionality of Plutus.
Cardano’s Fork High expectations
Ethereum’s experience with technical upgrades suggests that events like Chang may increase the price of the network’s native cryptocurrency. That’s what’s happening with Cardano (ADA), which saw an increase of almost 20% in the last week. It was trading at $0.57 at the close of this note, further driven by a bull market led by bitcoin (BTC).
Decentralized protocols developed on top of Cardano exceed USD 465 million in total value locked (TVL). The network had significant activity peaks in December, with several days above 100,000 daily transactions, well above the average for much of last year.