$ADA: A Look at Changes to Cardano Network Being Applied to Mainnet on December 1

Input Output (aka “IOHK, aka “IOG”), the blockchain company responsible for Cardano’s research and development, has announced a series of upcoming adjustments to the network in order to support future growth. 

In a blog post titled “Slow and Steady Wins the Race” that was published on November 22, John Woods, IOHK’s Director of Cardano Architecture, outlined the company’s plan to evolve the network in order to scale for future growth. Woods said Cardano has been architected from the beginning to balance the trade-off of “security, scalability and decentralization”, while being flexible enough to support a global base of millions of users. 

The new phase, dubbed “Basho,” is focused on optimization, scaling and network growth. IOHK anticipates “significant” traffic growth alongside the launch of new decentralized applications (DApps), and will be tweaking the network parameters accordingly. The post revealed that Cardano is currently only using 25% of its total capacity. 

Woods wrote, 

Ouroboros is designed to handle a large volume of data as well as transactions and scripts of different complexity and size. At present, and with current parameters, the Cardano network is utilizing on average only around 25% of its capacity. This is sub-optimal because in fact, the most efficient scenario is that Cardano runs at or close to 100% of its capacity (i.e., the network is ‘saturated’).

Woods outlined a series of upcoming changes, including increasing the block size from 8KB to 72KB and increasing Plutus script memory units per transaction to 11.25 million (a 12.5% increase). The latter will allow developers to create more sophisticated Plutus scripts, thereby expanding their capability to process data. 

These two changes are expected to be applied to the mainnet on Wednesday, December 1, 2021 at 21:45:00 UTC.

The post concluded by saying that Cardano’s evolution as a platform will be based on “empirical data drawn from the network” and reflect real user demand. IOHK claims it will avoid making long-term impact changes based upon short-term network usage in order to deliver the best overall experience.

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