Cardano wraps up ‘Alonzo’ upgrade, advances towards smart contracts
Cardano Network finally concluded its historical hard fork upgrade ‘Alonzo’ at 21:47 UTC on September 12. The upgrade came with a smart contract function on Cardano’s mainnet that allows anyone to create and deploy Dapps on its platform.
Founded by Ethereum Co-founder Charles Hoskinson and developed by IOHK, Cardano is an open-source public blockchain, based on the proof of stake mechanism.
The platform was launched in 2017 with the aim to challenge Ethereum’s decentralized finance dominance as well as maintaining interoperability with Ethereum and other blockchains.
Smart contracts are an essential element to challenge Ethereum, allowing it to become an ‘Ethereum Killer’. After developing and verifying the ‘purpose-built smart contract development language’ Plutus Scripts on the testnet, the upgrade finally went live on the mainnet.
With the introduction of smart contracts, it will be possible to build decentralized apps (Dapps) on Cardano. That being said, protocol development and maturity are still underway, so it may take some time to fully materialize.
In a blog published by Input Output on Sunday, the development team reminded us that the development is still in its infancy. It read:
“Let us be clear. There will be bumps in the road. Early user experiences might not be perfect. Some early DApps will have issues. We’ll see some great development teams and some poor ones. This is a permissionless, decentralized blockchain, so this is inevitable.”
It added:
“There are high expectations resting on this upgrade. Some unreasonably so. Cardano watchers may be expecting a sophisticated ecosystem of consumer-ready DApps available immediately after the upgrade. Expectations need to be managed here.”
Many Cardano enthusiasts, however, are excited to potentially see smart contracts deployed in the first few hours following the Alonzo hard fork. Projects currently under development may show up in the coming months.
Regarding the other functionalities included in the upgrade, the team wrote:
“The Alonzo HFC event will deploy Plutus 1.0, the core platform which itself will continue to evolve and bring more functionality over the coming months. Plutus is our native language, but of course, it is only the beginning here too. New bridges, sidechains, and other layer 2 solutions will bring in fresh options and an ever wider developer base.”
ADA, the native currency of the Cardano Blockchain, was trading at $2.43, down about 6.58% from its high of $2.79 on the same day. According to data provided by Coindesk, the native toked reached its ATH of $3.09 on Sept. 2, 2021.
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OhNoCryptocurrency via https://www.ohnocrypto.com/ @Gauri Bhatia, @Khareem Sudlow