Cardano’s Vasil Testnet Bug Misconceptions

Writing this post to clarify some misconceptions about the bug discovered on the Vasil testnet. You can see the activity on Github or the latest CH video to verify these points.

The bug discovered is critical and will cause a delay

This is clearly not the case. The bug was discovered by stake-pool operators (SPOs) on the v1.35.2 release, which is not the latest release-candidate; the issue was promptly solved on v1.35.3, along with other small inconsistencies. The code was already extensively tested and maintains a high level of assurance. Delaying everything to test it again will add no value.

SPOs are losing confidence in Cardano b/c of this

This is just absolute FUD. They found the bug as they were running their own tests and promptly informed IOG. This was discussed in the latest call between IOG and the SPOs, i.e., why it got this far in the release cycle to begin with and what needs to be done in the future to prevent this from happening again.

While several SPOs do want a different testing paradigm, they are quite clear on what needs to be done from the aforementioned IOG<=>SPOs call. In fact, this is just proof that the testing process is working; Cardano isn’t Solana where they’ll get DDOS’ed in some obvious-in-hindsight sort of way or just shut down the mainnet altogether due to a critical issue.

SPOs are doing their due diligence, unlike the FUDders in this sub, and are trying to help; they just didn’t communicate very effectively and overemphasized the issue.

Charles doesn’t take responsibility for Cardano

This is up there with the cringiest FUD yet. He’s saying the product and the process are decentralized, which means that neither he, his company, nor any other one person/entity has full control over everything; multiple groups of people need to verify everything in each step, which is necessary for decentralization.

This is part of why everything takes so long, but to be clear, it was done right the first time.

TL;DR: Bug was reproduced and fixed as part of the process, and it’s smooth-sailing on Cardano as almost always. The latest version (v1.35.3) has been extensively tested already and will very likely survive the hard fork; again, nobody can say for certain b/c it’s DECENTRALIZED, but there shouldn’t be many more (if any) delays from here on out.