Testnets are for Breaking — How Cardano Destroyed Theirs

In anticipation of its Vasil Hardfork upgrade which was designed to increase its scaling capabilities, Carnado pushed a heroically broken update, causing prominent Cardano Developer Adam Dean, to refer to the Testnet as “catastrophically broken”. It was so bad in fact, that the original testnet had to be abandoned for the time being, as testing had moved to two new test networks.

This article will provide an overview into Cardano’s 1.35.2 broken Testnet upgrade, and aim to provide answers regarding the status of the upcoming Vasil Hardfork upgrade.

The state of the Cardano Testnet

The issue stems from the fact Cardano Node Version 1.35.2, a prerequisite for the Vasil hard fork, contained a critical bug that was discovered because stake pool operators rushed to upgrade on the mainnet, and it led to the creation of incompatible forks.

The rush to upgrade could be seen a Cardano trying to get a competitive advance over Ethereum by deploying ahead of Ethereum's Merge. However, according to…