Cardano is boosting network capacity by increasing block size by 11%, Input Output reported.
The company that develops the blockchain Cardano's Input Output has released an update to increase the block size on the network in order to improve its scalability and respond to high demand.
Cardano, the industry's first scientific blockchain and the sixth by market cap, has grown in interest and adoption since the Alonzo upgrade enabled smart contracts (smart contracts) on the blockchain last September. To cope with this demand and growth, Cardano developers have decided to increase the block size, in order to increase the capacity of the network and, with it, its Scalability, which is one of the most desired features in blockchains today and one that users of these networks are increasingly becoming accustomed to.
The new update, which is expected to arrive this Thursday, February 4, with epoch 319 as reported by Cardano developers, increased the block size by 8 KB, that is, 11,1%, taking it from the current 72 KB to 80 KB.
In addition to this, Cardano also activated an upgrade to improve the performance of its Plutus smart contract platform, increasing the script memory units per transaction on the mainnet by 12%, from the current 12,5 million to a total of 14 million.
Both updates are part of plans announced by Cardano developers to scale and optimize network performance in response to increased usage and demand.
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Cardano, demand and scalability
One of the biggest debates regarding blockchain networks has been scalability. Blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum suffer from scalability issues in the face of the massive adoption they have gained worldwide. In the case of Bitcoin, which was born as an alternative payment network, it is used more as an investment asset than as a means of payment, since it can only process about 7 transactions per second. For its part, Ethereum has seen gas fees grow unimaginably in recent months, due to its high demand and poor scalability.
Thus, to address this problem, Cardano announced important developments and improvements for network scaling in 2022. The increase in block size and memory units are part of these plans. At the end of January, Input Output said that scalability and performance are crucial to maintaining Cardano's growth and competitiveness, so the network will continue to be optimized to cope with the large number of decentralized applications (DApps) that are now implemented on it and to ensure speed and performance for future DApps that will be launched on the network.
Increasing the block size allows the network to aggregate and process a larger number of transactions within the newly generated blocks, confirming transactions more quickly and thus improving scalability.
Basho, the new era of Cardano development
basho This is an era of optimization that will introduce significant improvements to Cardano to increase network performance in order to better support the growth and adoption of high-transaction volume decentralized applications based on this blockchain. Therefore, in this new era, Cardano developers will focus on scaling and optimizing the network to ensure high performance for developers and users and increase its utility, flexibility, and resilience.
In the Basho era, Cardano will introduce the sidechains or sidechains, which are new blockchains that are interoperable with the main chain and have immense potential to expand the capabilities of the blockchain. In its roadmap, Cardano notes that sidechains can be used as a sharding mechanism, which will help offload work from the main chain to a sidechain in order to increase the overall capacity of the main network.
In its previous eras, Cardano had focused primarily on decentralization, smart contracts, and DApps.
Record of 1.000 smart contracts
At the end of January, Cardano reached a new milestone by surpassing 1.000 smart contracts deployed on its blockchain. Smart contract functionality on Cardano was something that developers using the network had been demanding for a long time. It should be remembered that Cardano is a blockchain that is based on scientific research and peer review, so its development has been a bit slow for many. However, 2021 saw significant advancements, such as the arrival of smart contracts.
Currently, there are 1.127 smart contracts deployed on Cardano, according to data from the Data Studio web portal.
Scalability issues with SundaeSwap
Cardano's first DEX and AMM, SundaeSwap, was launched in late January. However, the huge interest and demand for this protocol caused the network to become congested and transactions to take longer than usual. Currently, the decentralized exchange's official website informs users about network congestion, which can affect the time it takes to complete swaps.
“The network is extremely congested at the moment. Trades may fail or not go through until the congestion subsides. Please be patient.”, warns SundaeSwap.
At the time of this writing, Cardano maintains a market capitalization 33.900 million, ranking as the sixth largest cryptocurrency in the industry. The price of its native cryptocurrency ADA is over $1,06. Last September, ADA reached an all-time high of $3,09 per unit.
Continue reading: Cardano (ADA) surges 25% as SundaeSwap launch nears
