Stephanie Douse 
Cardano is up 27% today in anticipation of the long-awaited Vasil hard fork update due to be released in June.
Key takeaways
- Cardano is up over 27% today, overtaking Ripple to become the sixth largest cryptocurrency on the market.
- The rally precedes the long-awaited Vasil hard fork upgrade, which aims to improve network throughput and efficiency.
- The launch of the Vasil testnet is scheduled for June 2nd, the launch of the mainnet for June 29th.
The global cryptocurrency market is seeing a small rally of relief. Cardano leads with a 27% price increase, overtaking Ripple to become the sixth largest cryptocurrency by market cap.
Cardano Usurps Ripple
Cardano is outperforming most of the cryptocurrency market.
The smart-contract blockchain ADA token is up 27% on the day amid a market-wide rally, overtaking Ripple to reclaim its place as the sixth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap.
The rally comes ahead of Cardano’s long-awaited Vasil hard fork update; The blockchain is set to see a testnet launch on June 2nd with a mainnet launch on June 29th.
Once fully released, the Vasil update will be the most significant overhaul to the network since the Alonzo hard fork in September 2021.
While the Alonzo update brought smart contracting capabilities to Cardano and unlocked a variety of new DeFi use cases, the upcoming Vasil hard fork will reportedly improve the network’s scalability and usability.
In particular, Vasil will come up with four Cardano improvement proposals, CIP31, CIP32, CIP33 and CIP40, which should rethink the logic of how Cardano’s Plutus scripts are sent to the blockchain.
Together, the CIP updates should reduce transaction fees, improve network throughput and decentralization, and address the so-called “concurrency problem” that has so far severely hampered the scalability of applications on the blockchain.
Despite being one of the first smart-contract-based Ethereum competitors to launch in 2017, Cardano fared significantly worse than most of its peers in terms of the ecosystem.
It introduced smart contracting capabilities long after other blockchains like Solana had already built their own DeFi and NFT ecosystems, and eight months later it is still seeing significantly lower activity than most other leading Tier 1 networks.
According to data from Defi Llama, Cardano has a total value of around $158 million in its decentralized apps, about 25 times less than Solana and 455 times less than Ethereum.
Interestingly, Ethereum’s market cap is around 11 times larger than Ethereum’s, despite the significant lead it has in the DeFi space.
The ADA is currently trading at around $0.66, up around 27% from today’s low of $0.51. This puts Cardano’s market capitalization at around $22.3 billion.