Cardano’s February release promises a lot, but will there be more to come

The Cardano network had faced several congestion issues last month when major decentralized applications (dApps) had rolled out on the network. However, it has since shown accelerated efforts towards fixing these scalability issues. It recently revealed a roadmap that is “focused on performance optimization and scalability”. And, it appears to be moving on time, with the February release launching on the network earlier today.

🆕Today, we have successfully deployed our major February release to the #Cardano network. You can find full release notes here: https://t.co/DYn4Q7qdXo.

For an overview check out our latest blog ⬇️ https://t.co/AYplx8UC0D

— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) February 28, 2022

The updates in the February release include the addition of multi-signature of transactions in incremental stages, which allows two parties to sign a transaction at different times rather than together. Node users will also be able to accurately estimate the cost of running a Plutus script, which is supposed to aid in the on-chain execution of smart contracts.

Stake pool operators to benefit

According to the Github release, Cardano Node version 1.34 is especially beneficial to stake pool operators, as it has added a number of new commands and options for easier accessibility, like the ability to check their own leadership schedule and review the next epoch ahead of time.

In a recent interview, IOHK’s Director of Cardano Architecture John Allan Woods explained that ultimately, the February release was built to increase end user-friendliness, especially by decreasing the amount of data required to process the network. He said,

“For folks who are running Deadlus or a node at home will require less RAM because we have been able to make more efficient optimizations on the structure of data in RAM. Ultimately the node is less resource-intensive and demands less of the end-users computer.”

These optimization features are being launched as release deployments, which “groups new features for our technology stack into more manageable periodic releases”, a blog post by Cardano’s development arm IOHK noted. This grouping strategy is aimed at increasing the predictability of the network so that companies can prepare themselves according to the upgrades, it further added.

The February release is the first of three major code drops set to be released over 2022, and are aimed at upgrading the core network. The other two will be set around June and October, which will also feature hard fork combinator (HFC) events, revealed IOHK, adding,

“These include key elements of our scaling plan like pipe-lining, new Plutus CIPs, UTXO on-disk storage, and Hydra… IOG is working across a host of new products and features, from a DApp store and a new light wallet product to Mithril fast sync solution and sidechains.”