Cardano Completes Hard Fork For Alonzo White – What’s Next?
Alonzo’s testnet went through a successful Hard Fork known as Alonzo White that will allow it to incorporate more advanced smart contracts and decentralized finance applications to its blockchain. Let’s look into what’s next on the way to smart contracts on Cardano?
Cardano closes in on one of its most important milestones since its inception, the implementation of its smart contract platform, Plutus. Input-Output Global (IOG) announced via its Twitter handle the successful roll-out of the Hard Fork for the Alonzo Testnet.
HARD FORK SUCCESSFUL: Delighted to report around 19.44 UTC today we successfully forked the #Alonzo testnet to the new #AlonzoWhite node. The new network is happily making blocks already. 1/5
This update will integrate Plutus into the mainnet, as NewsBTC previously reported. At the moment, Cardano’s developer is testing Alonzo in color code phases, the first one was blue.
Yesterday, July 15th around 19:44 UTC, the testnet migrated to the Alonzo White node. IOG said: “the new network is happily making blocks already”.
Each phase has its own specific set of objectives and tasks to be completed with support from the Staking Pool Operators (SPO) and other partners. IOG added:
“Over the past week, we have spun up a new network and onboarded our new intake ready to help us move us closer to smart contracts. Now the next stage of the journey begins.“
During this phase, the company revealed that the SPOs will have support from the Project Catalyst crew, an initiative to provide the community with financial support to launch certain projects, and additional Plutus partners and Pioneers.
Smart contracts are effectively contracts that execute automatically once a series of conditions have been met. They also allow engineers to use the blockchain to perform a range of functions like send information, or documents. DeFi applications allow two counterparties to exchange capital, or assets, without an intermediary.
In future phases, the testnet will be more open with participation from the Cardano community. IOG will focus on the following:
“We’ll monitor the new network closely over the next 24 hours while continuing to do further QA work on the node tonight. We’ll then review any feedback/results tomorrow and start addressing any required fixes. We expect a number of updates as we add features to Alonzo White.”
A New Era With Alonzo Going Forward
A month ago, IOG celebrated the deployment of a simple smart contract on the AlonzoBlue Cardano Tesnet. Nigel Hemsley, Head of Delivery for IOG, said that the SPOs have been running the testnet nodes with success alongside the Pioneers.
According to the company’s roadmap, AlonzoBlue was intended to run the first exercise of a smart contract and the initial ADA distribution to the SPOs.
Now, AlonzoWhite will run demo dApps, integration with WBE and PAB, benchmarks, and will have the participation of around 500 community members. Additionally, during this phase, Cardano will run the scripts on the network for a basic dApp version of decentralized exchange Uniswap.
In August, if White turns out equally successful, IOG will launch AlonzoPurple. This will be the first public testnet for Cardano and its smart contract platform. All Pioneers will be onboarded with partner dApps.
Emurgo, one of the founding entities of Cardano’s protocol, detailed some of the benefits that Alonzo brings to the ecosystem, including the opportunity to test out smart contracts for the first time. It’s also worth noting that Alonzo will be fully public once it rolls into purple – this should be the next phase, as mentioned above.
Also, the launch of the above should feature the very first major public testnet that will also see participation of all the pioneers. The last two stages are Alonzo Red and Alonzo Black. It’s also worth noting that after Alonzo Black rolls out, there’s a staging period before the Alonzo mainnet goes live.
The network’s native ada token briefly climbed up to a session high of $1.29 on Thursday after the news, before slipping back to around $1.2203, marking a 3.4% daily drop, based on Coinbase data. Ada is the fifth largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, according to Coinmarketcap.
At the time of writing, ADA trades at $1,24 with a 3.2% loss in the daily chart.
