Fork, yeah! Cardano Vasil upgrade goes live

cointelegraph.com:

After several months of delays, the Cardano Vasil upgrade and hard fork has finally gone live as of Thursday at 9:44 pm UTC, bringing “significant performance and capability” enhancements to the blockchain.

The success of the Cardano mainnet hard fork was announced by blockchain company Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) on Twitter on Thursday, while others also observed the hard fork tick over in a live Twitter Spaces with Cardano co-founder Charles Hoskinson.

#Vasil mainnet HFC event successful!We’re happy to announce that today, at 21:44:00 UTC, the IOG team, in collaboration with the @CardanoStiftung, successfully hard forked the Cardano mainnet via a HFC event, thus deploying new #Vasil features to the chain.1/5

IOHK previously stated the significant upgrades brought by the fork is block transmission without full validation, allowing for faster block creation. Upgrades to its Plutus smart contracts for increased efficiency also allow decentralized applications to deploy and run at lower costs.

Better buy some mouthwash. Vasil is live. Anyone have recommendations for Greg :) https://t.co/RTehxad97Z

New capabilities brought by the Plutus script upgrades will become available for developers on the mainnet on Sept. 27, after one epoch which currently lasts around five days.

Bill Barhydt, founder of crypto trading platform Abra called the upgrade a “big win for developers” with decentralized finance platform Genius Yield tweeting it was “one of the most complex and consequential updates to the Cardano network ever done.”

Congrats to Cardano ($ADA) team on Vasil hardfork. More hard work in crypto paying off.Making UTXO's and inputs accessible to scripts/Plutus without spending them is a big win for developers. Well done! Congrats