In the wee hours of Wednesday in Asia, the “Valentine” upgrade was launched on the mainnet. Crypto majors underperformed native ADA tokens.Early on Wednesday morning in Asia, a change to the Cardano blockchain’s security and interoperability features was made live.The patch, code-named “Valentine,” will improve cross-chain capabilities for decentralized financial (DeFi) applications developing on the network. According to CoinDesk, it was put forth earlier in February and approved by network validators.
The upgrade is expected to boost Cardano’s cryptographic capabilities while facilitating the creation of cross-chain decentralized applications (dapps) on Plutus, the Cardano blockchain’s smart contract platform.
“Interoperability is essential for blockchain development. It is crucial that when additional DApps are developed on Cardano, they are not siloed to just one ecosystem, enabling users to interact with different blockchains and access a wider range of services,” Cardano developer and code maintainer said in a tweet.
Cross-chain bridges are software applications that enable transactions to occur between various blockchains.
Such a feature on Cardano would allow developers to build applications that connect Cardano with other blockchains, which would in turn give users access to other blockchains to interact easily with financial services offered by Cardano dapps.
Dapps rely on smart contracts instead of middlemen to offer financial services, such as lending and borrowing, to users, who often use that dapp’s token or are rewarded in those tokens.
This, in turn, would likely improve the utility of Cardano’s native ADA tokens. As such, Wednesday’s upgrade preceded buying pressure on the tokens, with prices up 8% in the past 24 hours – outperforming bitcoin and ether.
The locked value of tokens on Cardano-based dapps has increased over 100% since the start of January to over $110 million, suggesting demand.
