Cardano News: dReps for Delegated Voting Power, Vasil Upgrade Arrival Confirmed

Here are the recent top headlines around the Cardano ecosystem:

Cardano ‘introduces' dReps for delegated voting power

Input Output Global, the foundation backing the Cardano network, last week announced the introduction of the delegate representatives (dReps) concept. Delegate representatives is a new initiative to ensure that all proposals get a fair chance to gain funding via Project Catalyst.

Project Catalyst is Cardano's innovation fund that is controlled by the community. Over the course of the year, Catalyst is expected to fund north of 2,100 proposals, a sign of the growing network Cardano is. With the exponential increase in the number of proposals received, it was resolved that delegation be used as it would enable the community to satisfy its responsibility to review and vote on all of them.

ADA holders would authorize the dReps to vote on matters on their behalf, with the representatives able to cover many more proposals than the holders could – this structure aims at sustainability. To improve on decision-making in each fund, the delegate reps will collaboratively work on policies, get, and review data, talk to the experts, and then vote on subject matters brought forward by the community.

Cardano's Vasil upgrade event aims at a June 29 timeline

Director of Cardano Architecture John Woods has issued an update on the coming Vasil upgrade. The Cardano executive told the community to anticipate a release come June 29. While he was not too resolute with the date, he said he expects that it should give developers adequate time to handle the work remaining towards the update.

What will it come with?

Woods explained that Cardano has already gone code complete – to mean that developers are done writing up all the components to ship with the Vasil hard fork. The new items to come include reference scripts, reference inputs, and inline datums, all of which will provide a better environment for dApps on Cardano to operate.

Also, these hard fork upgrades will enhance the developer experience on the network. Another major change expected is diffusion pipelining, which would bring faster block propagation and boost scalability on the Cardano network.

There is still much before it is ready to ship

Cardano developers are working on deep QA and integration testing, hunting for any regressions, bugs, or cases of reduced performance. This would help Cardano achieve surety that the network will remain as good as before even after the improvements ship.

Further, Woods said that IOHK has also informed partners, developers, and crypto exchanges of the changes to come. While end-users may not see much difference (beyond downloading the new node and setting up), the exchanges and developers must be prepared beforehand as they are entities whose services cannot be halted.

With that in mind, a testnet will be coming to enable them to delve into the upcoming update and prepare accordingly. He also reminded users that the changes coming to Plutus would not be automatic; thus, they must actively take them up in their dApps, if they are to see a shift in performance.

Rapper Snoop Dogg boards Cardano, deeper into NFT exploration

Calvin Broadus Jr, stage name Snoop Dogg, has been known for venturing into NFT spaces under the Cozomo de' Medici alias. His activities were previously confined to Ethereum NFTs, but he has now boarded Cardano.

Clay Nation, an NFT project making handcrafted clay qualities on the Cardano blockchain, announced last week that it had collaborated with Snoop Dogg and crypto investor Champ Medici to launch clay NFTs. The minted tokens included unlockable music content, limited edition plots, and memorable collectibles. Also, this collection has 10,000 algorithmically-generated tokens, which have since sold out since launch.

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