Cardano increases throughput (again)

At the epoch transition to 335 today, Cardano will increase its block size another 10% to 88kB payload.

This is the sixth parameter update to increase the throughput of the L1 in 2022 alone. Cardano does not need any hard forks to achieve these scaling improvements, as some very limited parameters can be updated by publishing signed messages to the block-chain. The updates must be signed by 5 of 7 Genesis keys held by IOG, EMURGO and the Cardano Foundation.

There is often confusion that Cardano is somehow currently at its throughput limit, this is not the case. After some period of monitoring, its fully expected that Cardano will see further enhancements, in the next few months.

For Cardano to stay secure blocks must propagate to 95% of stake within stake pools within 5 seconds. It is currently taking 1-2 seconds for blocks of 80kB to transition, meaning there is already plenty of capacity within the current network architecture. You can see the live propagation of blocks and the time its taking to a subset of nodes here: https://pooltool.io/realtime

The Vasil HFC, expected 29th June, will optimize many elements of the system; transactions will get smaller, cryptography will be de-duplicated, and block propagation will become more efficient. This will simply increase the headroom for larger upgrades in throughput on the Cardano L1.