Now another thing that has crypto holders concerned is the risk of on-chain censorship after Ethereum transitions from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.
This is because Ethereum’s largest validators are regulated entities which could potentially be coerced by regulators to enforce rules at the protocol level. While this risk appears to be extremely low it’s large enough that large crypto mining company ant pool recently announced it will be pulling its clients funds from Ethereum post merch citing on chain censorship fears. Note that this could have something to do with antpool being a Chinese company.
Now as some of you will know one of the ways I’ve personally been hedging myself against something going wrong with Ethereum’s merge is to hold competing smart contract cryptocurrencies as part of my portfolio and this includes Cardano’s ADA.
As many of you will also know Cardano is overdue for a hard fork called Vasil which was initially supposed to happen in June but was delayed by a month after minor bugs were discovered and then indefinitely delayed again in July to ensure quote a smooth process.
More recently a Cardano developer claimed in a Twitter thread that Cardano’s Vassal testnet was quote “catastrophically broken due to a series of bugs” and cautioned that the Vassal hard fork should not be rushed. In an AMA shortly afterwards Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson came out to call the quote unfair narrative about Cardano’s test net quote incredibly corrosive and damaging adding that the issue the Cardano developer identified was addressed in the latest release of the Cardano test net.
Charles also stated that the Vessel hard fork will likely take place quote “sometime in September” and that a concrete date will be set the moment the five largest cryptocurrency exchanges are prepared for the upcoming upgrade.
For those unfamiliar the Vassal hard fork is expected to drastically improve Cardano’s scalability ie speed. Not surprisingly the soft September schedule for the Vassal hard fork has led to speculation that Cardano is planning on the hard fork occurring around the time of Ethereum’s merge with crypto media outlet decrypt noting that this is quote perhaps not coincidental.
Indeed it would be an admittedly strategic move if Cardano improved its scalability around the time Ethereum transitions to proof of stake.
This is because it would put Cardano in a perfect position to acquire users and investors if the merge fails or simply fails to meet the expectations of ETH holders.