In Brief:
- Cardano deployed the most anticipated update ‘Alonzo Hard Fork’
- Update will allow users to develop new DApp using smart contracts
- The testnet launched earlier this month
Cardano has finally launched the most-awaited update ‘Alonzo Hard Fork’ at epoch 290, which adds smart contract compatibility on the Cardano blockchain. The launch of a smart contract on Cardano will enable new use cases of decentralized applications (DApps) for the very first time.
Now all users on Cardano Blockchain can deploy their own smart contract. Alonzo is the name for the update for the smart contract on the Cardano network. Cardano has integrated Plutus scripts onto the blockchain for the smart contract launch.
Plutus is “a purpose-built smart contract development language and execution platform using the functional programming language Haskell”.
The update was first released in September 2017. It was designed to compete with Ethereum’s DeFi dominance with the interoperability with Ethereum and other blockchains. The update is part of the Goguen era, which primarily focuses on smart contracts compatibility.
As well as adding the functionality of smart contracts, Goguen will also see improvements to the core of Cardano offering. It will also enable users to create new natively supported tokens. This will allow the creation of fungible and non-fungible tokens, supporting the creation of new cryptocurrencies on Cardano.
However, it will take some time before Cardano will be entirely ready for Dapps to fully enable on the Mainnet. The blog post said, “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.”
The team has encouraged its community to maintain their expectations, saying: “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”
The reason behind Alonzo’s late launch is a verification process. It has already lived on the testnet on Cardano’s blockchain. Where it was only available for some developers. The team of Cardano wanted to test these updates on testnet before launching on Mainnet to ensure the security and quality of updates. This whole testnet process had been decided in color-coded phase, in order Blue, White, Purple, Red, and Black.
The team will continue to focus on various improvements including synchronization efforts and compression of transaction script sizes to optimize throughput on the network.
It is known that in August 2021, Cardano had become the third-largest virtual cryptocurrency by market capitalization, after Bitcoin and Ethereum. Because of the excitement of the launch of the smart contract, ADA surged 1300% in 2021 and reached an all-time-high with $3 in value.
Right now Ethereum blockchain is the largest blockchain in the world where lots of users deploy smart contracts. With the launch of the Cardano Blockchain smart contract, diversification of users is expected.
Read here all about the Cardano’s New Upgrade ‘Alonzo Hard Fork’.
