As St. Valentine’s day approaches, so does the new Cardano (ADA) upgrade, fittingly called the Valentine, introduced with an aim to facilitate secure cross-chain dApp development on the Plutus platform while advancing the network’s objective of blockchain interoperability.
Also called the SECP, Cardano’s Valentine upgrade is set to go live on the mainnet on February 14, whereas its functionality is planned to be available in the pre-production environment on February 11, the Cardano developer Input Output announced on Twitter on February 8.
What Valentine entails
Specifically, Valentine is the next protocol upgrade to the Cardano network after Vasil, introducing “new built-in functions to Plutus to support ECDSA and Schnorr cryptographic signatures,” which will “allow developers to use a wider range of multi-signature or threshold signature designs.”
Additionally, this upgrade will be “native to Cardano and provide the highest level of security,” using “the same Cardano’s hard fork combinator (HFC) approach to bring this new cross-chain functionality to the Cardano network,” according to the Input Output article published on February 8.
On January 19, Tim Harrison, the company’s Vice President of Community and Ecosystem, stated that the preparations for this upgrade had been underway for some time across the entire ecosystem, with intensive integration testing in a preview environment since November 2022.
As the more recent article by IOHK’s Technical Support Manager Viktor Lyaskov specified, more than 77% of stake pool operators (SPOs) were running the required new node at the moment of writing, “with 86% of blocks produced, surpassing the goal of 75% of produced blocks by the time of the upgrade.”
Cardano’s milestones
Meanwhile, the Cardano team is working hard on reaching its other technological advancement goals, such as launching a fully operational public testnet of for its Ethereum (ETH) sidechain, following the release of its sidechain building toolkit.
On top of that, Cardano has recently ranked second in its GitHub development activity, as well as assuming the same position among the leading smart contract cryptocurrency projects by staking market capitalization, while the number of smart contracts on the network recently exceeded 5,000, as Finbold reported.
It is also important to note that Cardano has recently registered the highest activity of its whales in the last nine months, witnessing transaction rates not seen since May 2022, paving the way for a possible substantial price increase of its native ADA token.
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