On Thursday (May 12), Dan Gambardello, Founder of Crypto Capital Venture, said that Cardano is “silently positioning itself as the most sound, secure, & scalable blockchain.”

On May 12, Gambadello, who has long been a huge fan of Cardano and is a respected member of the Cardano community, told his over 225K Twitter followers:

Gambadello is also the host of the very popular YouTube channel “Crypto Capital Venture“.

Earlier today (May 14), he tweeted that “we are watching #Cardano blockchain explode with innovation,” and went on to say that “one project which acts as a community-run launchpad is now playing a big role in that innovation.” He was referring to Cardashift ($CLAP), “a community-run launchpad that raises funds, builds and accelerates startups that are solving social and environmental issues.”

Regarding $ADA’s performance during the current bear market, he had this to say on Friday (May 13):

“I am 100% aware $ADA underperforms in downtrends. People don’t realize that this is one reason I like it so much. Because while it does underperform in downtrends, it outperforms in uptrends. This means that we now have a way undervalued asset with most upside potential.

“This is my take on the market. This is my approach. This is my opinion based on my risk appetite and what I view as compelling opportunity. It’s not advice to anyone to go out and buy $ADA. Please be careful out there.“

As for IO Global (aka “IOG”, formerly known as “IOHK”), the company responsible for the research and development of the Cardano protocol, yesterday, they provided the “Mid Month Development Update”, during which Tim Harrison, who is VP of Community & Ecosystem at IOG, asked Nigel Hemsley, Head of Delivery & Projects at IOG, for a status update on the the Vasil hard fork, which is expected to take place around June 29th.

Hemsley replied:

“Well, we’re all guns blazing for the Vasil hard fork, Tim. Right now, we’re preparing for our closed public testnet phase… We do our initial sort of network tests and then as we move from there, we can then do further regression tests and move into testing the new functionality. And this will run until we get to the point where we can hard fork the Cardano testnet.

“Along with our SPO colleagues, we have dApp projects that are helping us, running applications on the mainnet and on the testnet. And they really help us to basically test regressions of what they’re using in our infrastructure, and they’re also then designing new tests for the new functionality that they can take advantage of once we’ve actually gone past the hard fork.

“Not only this, all the usual infrastructure project products are coming online. So, all the familiar names — DB Sync, Rosetta, GraphQL, Explorer — need to be updated, and they are coming out of their integration phase. And we’re now into this process where we can actually start regression testing against these different products. Once we get past this stage, we’ve got all the basic infrastructure into place.

“That’s when exchanges come online, and they can then test their integrations that are so important for us to actually continue to run Cardano as it is today. By the end of May, we should be in a position to be able to hard fork the Cardano testnet, and that’s what’s on our plan at the moment. And at the moment, we are on track for that.“

On April 12, Charles Hoskinson, who is Co-Founder and CEO of IOG, released a video on his YouTube channel that provided an update on various matters of interest to $ADA HODLers.

The IOG CEO started by mentioning that they are preparing for the upcoming Consensus 2022 event, which is being held held June 9-12 in Austin, Texas:

“We’re renting a large pavilion there, and we’re going to go along with many of the other members of the Cardano ecosystem, and hopefully we’ll be able to showcase that Cardano is open for business.“

Next, he mentioned why he is excited about the Vasil hard fork, which is also expected to take place in June:

“As many of, you know, a major major major hard fork combinator event is happening in June, which is the Vasil hard fork, and that is going to contain pipelining, which will be a massive performance improvement to Cardano, alongside the first wave of significant Plutus enhancements since Plutus shipped in September.“

On February 1, John Woods, Director of Cardano Architecture at IOG, published a blog post, in which he introduced pipelining:

“Pipelining is, effectively, an evolution in Cardano’s ‘plumbing’. It is a key element in our scaling plan this year, one in the series of published steps covering our methodical approach to flex Cardano’s capacity as the ecosystem grows…

“Pipelining – or more precisely, diffusion pipelining – is an improvement to the consensus layer that facilitates faster block propagation. It enables even greater gains in headroom, which will enable further increases to Cardano’s performance and competitiveness...

“Pipelining is just one of the pillars supporting Cardano’s scaling this year. Combined, all these changes will lead Cardano to a position where it is faster than its competitors, and a highly competitive platform for decentralized finance (DeFi) this year.“

As you may remember, in March, Hoskinson said on Twitter that there are many Cardano DeFi apps that are waiting for Vasil hard fork combinator (HFC) event, and once that happens, we should see an even more impressive growth in Cardano’s TVL.

By the way, in case you are wondering why the June hard fork is called “Vasil”, on 10 December 2021, Hoskinson explained that he was going to honour his Bulgarian friend and Cardano ambassador Vasil Dabov — who had died recently — by naming the June hard fork after him. Dabov was a blockchain consultant, Haskell practioneer, and an experienced ginkgologist.

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Disclaimer

The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.

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