The latest announcement on Charles Hoskinson’s Twitter page that Cardano will be a much better platform for DeFi platforms and will handle more NFT transactions was somewhat ridiculed by many online communities as some users calculated that the new top-performance speed for the network will be under 9 TPS. Yes, you read that correctly. It will be less than 9 transactions per second.
While the Vasil fork will bring more utility and allow for more complex NFT transactions as well as better performance, the issue is that Cardano is betting on the unlikely survival of the NFT industry. While survival is possible based on the number of big companies entering the scene with their takes on how to use non-fungible tokens (Nike, FIFA, and Reddit come to mind), the expansion of the industry beyond some niche use cases seems far-fetched.
Nevertheless, the Vasil hard fork is a big event for the Cardano network and it will occur on September 22 if everything goes smoothly. It was scheduled for June, but technical issues prevented it from deployment. Some think that the delay is strategic, as it moves the deployment date to the end of September which will be after the Ethereum merge. It is a gamble that users may not like the performance or the new structure of the ETH network and move to Cardano.
This notion seems to be overly optimistic, but it created a lot of commotion among crypto enthusiasts and speculators. The excitement is almost palpable in the steady gains demonstrated by ADA throughout the last month. Despite the crypto winter, ADA managed to gain momentum and has a strong, albeit temporary, market position.
The news that the network will reach 9 TPS after Vasil is not something that infuses hope and optimism in many investors that are looking for serious projects that promise growth and more utility. With other competing networks like Tezos which aims at a thousand transactions per second, the number 9 without zeros or the letter “K” following it looks almost laughable. We do not defy the idea that Cardano will have a better market position after the hard fork, but it seems less likely now.