Very highly anticipated Smart Contract is finally live on Cardano blockchain. On Sunday, around 17:26 UTC Cardano team successfully submitted an updated proposal to the mainnet, to trigger a hard fork combinator event.
Later today, we’ll deploy Plutus smart contract capabilities onto the Cardano mainnet via an HFC (hard fork combinator) protocol upgrade event.
IOHK Team
Cardano team was preparing for this event for a very long time. It is believed to be an epochal moment in the birth of a new ecosystem. A user on Twitter posted that just after the upgrade took place, there were already 23 smart contracts running on Cardano. However, these are likely toy contracts from the Cardano team itself.
Cardano Smart Contract is brought by the Alonzo upgrade through the integration of Plutus scripts onto the blockchain. These will allow the implementation of smart contracts on Cardano, enabling a host of new use cases for decentralized applications (DApps) for the very first time.
Also read - Cardano (ADA) awesome curated resources
The testnet was launched a month back and had received some criticism on its choice of technology and design that leads to many dApps (decentralized applications) delaying their launch. However, Cardano founder, Charles, and IOHK team remains strong on their stand on the choice of its technology and design.
The anticipation of Smart Contract sent the price of Cardano (ADA) rocketing earlier this month; Cardano hit an all-time high of $3.09 when Cardano’s developer, IOHK, launched Alonzo’s testnet on September 2. But the price later fell to $2.60 amid criticisms that the upgrade had difficulties processing concurrent transactions.
Ethereum investor Anthony Sassano pointed that the first dApp, a multipool exchange named Minswap, shut down shortly after it launched because it struggled to process multiple transactions at once.
IOHK sidelined all the criticism and tweeted that these are just speculations and outright FUD and misinformation. Cardano handles unspent transactions and gives “greater security” and “fee predictability” that is missing in almost all blockchain. We have witnessed a series of rug pulls and the loss of million of dollars in cyber theft on other blockchains because of poor design and security.
Smart Contract release will definitely give birth to a whole new ecosystem for developers to build and launch innovative products. All the core building blocks are already present and with time it will only strengthen and improve. Despite all criticism, it is now evident that Cardano stands still on its mission to bring a strong blockchain platform to the world. Thousands of developers have been taking part in the Plutus Pioneers course, learning the fundamentals of Cardano’s native development framework and hundreds of projects have been actively working on the various Cardano testnets and privately-hosted solutions. Some 150 projects are developing their ideas and have been supported and funded by Cardano’s Catalyst innovation program.
Without even having a smart contract feature, Cardano still managed to build a strong community and ecosystem of products. Now with the smart contract in place, the ecosystem will only evolve with time. The Alonzo upgrade is a transformational network upgrade that will catalyze a blossoming ecosystem of developers, creators, and innovators around the world.
