Cardano Takes Alonzo Live Bringing Smart Contracts To Mainnet
Cardano’s network update known as Alonzo is now live. The upgrade brings smart contract capabilities and allows developers to launch new projects and applications on the network, including decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and stablecoins.
1/2 Upgrade successful.
Moments ago, we deployed the #Alonzo upgrade at the epoch rollover.
Founded by Charles Hoskinson, Cardano is an open-source public blockchain developed by Input Output. It was first released in September 2017, and designed to challenge Ethereum’s decentralized finance dominance while also maintaining a level of interoperability with Ethereum and other blockchains.
Smart Contract on Cardano
Smart contracts are a key piece when it comes to mounting that challenge. After months of progress on the Alonzo testnet, today’s hard fork to the Cardano mainnet paves the way for smart contracts to be written in Plutus scripts, a purpose-built smart contract development language and execution platform using the functional programming language Haskell.
The update is a key part of of the Goguen era, which focuses primarily on building smart contract capabilities. Goguen was developed in tandem with Shelley, the earlier era that introduced proof-of-stake protocol Ouroboros to the network more than a year ago, as part of an effort to build out the network’s security and decentralization.
The introduction of Cardano’s Plutus scripts will also enable decentralized applications (dapps) to be built in the ecosystem. However, it may still take some time before the Cardano ecosystem is entirely ready for dapps to fully materialize on the mainnet, as the protocol continues to be developed and to mature.
Hoskinson’s Update
Hoskinson, in his video update, said he believes the platform’s long path to the smart contract era will be beneficial for the entire crypto industry.
“We worked for a very long time. Some of the members of this team have been working for over four years. We did our work. [We did] our homework. We did hundreds of presentations, dozens of papers.
So much code was written and a lot of very careful thought went into building a very novel model that’s ubiquitously beneficial, if anything, as an experiment for the industry [that] we feel is the best industrial model.”
Now that smart contract capability is live on Cardano’s mainnet, Hoskinson is looking ahead to what’s next for the ecosystem, including the debut of the Plutus application backend, which offers a suite of components that will allow both technical and non-technical users to build on the network.
“So that’s the day, and you know what happens? There has to be a morning after, September 13th, Monday. We wake up. It’s business as usual. Lots of things will happen. [The] network will probably be under a lot more load because people play around with things and test things and that’s fine.
And a few weeks later, the latest and greatest version of the Plutus application backend will be released and we’ll have the [Cardano 2021] summit. And there will be a huge spotlight on the ecosystem as a whole. That will be a great event.”
Not without Hiccups
The rollout wasn’t without its hiccups. It was recently brought up that there’s a fundamental concurrency issue within the fundamental design of Cardano’s smart contract capabilities.
This basically means that multiple users can’t interact with a protocol at the same time. However, Charles Hoskinson, as well as Input Output (the team behind Cardano), went in-depth to explain the entire smart contract model of the network and how this is not an issue.
Moreover, a couple of days ago, Input Output published a brand new blog that explains Cardano’s EUTXO approach to smart contract execution and how it offers greater security, lack of charges for failed transactions, and full cost predictability.
In any case, with today’s hard fork going through, this marks a new era for the Cardano project, and it’s interesting to see how it will impact its ecosystem going forward.
Cardano ADA Price
Cardano’s native cryptocurrency, ADA, is at the time of writing trading at 2.44, with 5.72% loss on a daily chart. ADA reached its all-time high of $3.09 on September 2, 2021. It will be interesting to see how the market reacts to today’s news.
