The eagerly awaited Vasil hard fork upgrade from Ethereum (ETH) rival Cardano (ADA) is scheduled to launch today, with plans for developers to start utilizing its new features by next week.

According to CEO Charles Hoskinson of Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), the mainnet update is prepared for release.

“A joint [Input Output Global] and [Cardano Foundation] team will use the hard fork combinator to deploy Vasil at the protocol level on September 22nd. The new capabilities will become available for developers to utilize on mainnet exactly one epoch later, on September 27th.”

Charles Hoskinson, co-creator of the ADA and CEO of IOHK, previously stated that the Vasil hard fork is Cardano’s next stage of maturation and should increase its utility and scalability.

“Moving forward, there’s going to be a big retrospective on how we do things better. There’s also going to be a deep conversation about the overall architecture of Cardano as it is, and how we take it to the next level to make it more useful, portable, scalable, and better for everybody…

It’s becoming more clear that the distance between us and everyone else is growing. We built Cardano to be the financial operating system of the world. We built it to bank the unbanked. We built it as a community to give economic identity to those who don’t have it so we can have one global fair marketplace.

It’s a crazy mission, and it feels vast in scope but with Vasil coming on September 22nd, it feels that much more achievable.”

Many well-known cryptocurrency analysts, including Michal van de Poppe and Benjamin Cowen, have predicted rallies for the smart contract platform in response to the upgrade. Van de Poppe asserted that a price of $1.00 is not out of the question, while Cowen predicted that ADA would hit $0.60.

The two biggest cryptocurrency exchanges, Coinbase and Binance, declared that they would halt ADA transactions during the update in advance of the hard fork.