Cardano has achieved a major milestone with the mainnet launch of the highly anticipated Mithril upgrade. On July 30, an announcement by Cardano stake pool operator (SPO) Banksy revealed that Mithril was now live on the mainnet.
Mithril is a stake-based network of nodes that enable the creation of snapshots and certificates of the Cardano Node, allowing for a fast bootstrap and restoration. This protocol is expected to bring several benefits to network users, such as increased efficiency for Cardano full node clients and improved access to Daedalus and other network applications. Romain Pellerin, the CTO of Cardano R&D company Input Output, noted via X (fka Twitter) that “with Mithril, SPOs give you regular certified snapshots of the Cardano state (more precisely the UTXO set i.e. the leaves of the graph formed by its transactions over time), so you can build services without running a node. Fast bootstrap is a first use case.”
Reacting to the protocol’s launch, the price of Cardano’s native token ADA jumped to near $0.32. While the current market climate keeps ADA hovering within a tight range above $0.30, the potential for a sharp flip higher has been added to with the new network milestone. Other network metrics, such as the count of github commits, suggest that a breakout for ADA amid a wider market rally could see bulls target year-to-date highs of $0.45.
