Cardano Is Increasing The Block Size On The 4th Of February
Cardano´s blockchain has been on heavy load this January. The launch of SundaeSwap and an increase on the number of transactions have brought Cardano to nearly 100% load, this means that the blockchain started to get slow and transactions took to much time to go through.
One thing that can solve this problem is increasing the block size, currently the block size is set to 72KB but IOHK made an announcement today stating that the block size will be increased to 80KB, an 11% increase on the block size.
You may be asking what does block size means. Every transaction on the blockchain occupies space, meaning that only a number of transactions can be put on a block before it gets full. When the block is full, the next transaction in line will have to wait for the next block to be processed. The time between this two block are the time the user have to wait for the transaction to go through. If the block size is low, transactions will have to wait on queue and the user will experience a high amount of time until his transaction is received on his wallet. Increasing the block size on the other hand helps fitting more transactions on a block, making transactions go faster and making the user experience better.
This means that Cardano will be able to handle transactions better and faster which was necessary right away. As DEXs keep launching, more and more scalability will be needed for Cardano to handle the number of transaction and this increase will help.
Another update is the Plutus memory limits that will be increased from 12.5 million units to 14 million units.
IOHK is adjusting the blockchain carefully and if what they are doing is not enough they will adjust the parameters again until the network is running smoothly. Cardano is already running on the Basho Era, the one that is meant to scale Cardano, so all of this things are being treated carefully and with high attention to what is happening.
Further on the road Hydra will be introduced which will scale Cardano to another level.
Users are eager for these changes to occur, some transactions on SundaeSwap took hours or days to be processed. Investors have to have confidence to bring their money to Cardano and slow transactions aren´t a good advertisement for Cardano. Developers also have to have confidence to bring their projects to Cardano and they don´t want to be accused of their project being too slow. As you can see all these changes are needed for Cardano to be successfull in the long term, what we can see is that this was all planned and everyone was aware that changes would be needed.
The thing that really helps Cardano is that a change only takes 1 epoch (5 days) to take effect, which means that Cardano can come with a solution and implement it in a matter of 5 days.
Right now Cardano sits with a TVL of 75 million USD, a significant increase since the beginning of January. With more dapps being announced each day this value is set to skyrocket and put Cardano on one of the top blockchains by TVL (Total Value Locked).
SundaeSwap might have been a chaos storm but in the end this events will make Cardano more scalable. IOHK wanted to see how Cardano could handle heavy load and the results are here. Although it took time for transactions to go through, Cardano didn´t go through an outage and the blockchain is online since its inception. Now it´s time to adjust the blockchain to be prepared for what is coming. More and more updates will come until the experience of the Cardano´s blockchain is smooth and friendly.
Best Regards,
Cryptopeach
