Cardano launches smart contracts after Alonzo hard fork
On August 12, Cardano informed through a tweet that its current upgrade, the Alonzo hard fork, has had a successful completion at epoch 290, thus facilitating for the first time the creation as well as execution of smart contracts on a public blockchain.
Although a big step, Cardano maintained humility, acknowledging that it is still in its “early days for the project,” when the mission has actually begun.
Cardano is a public blockchain, initially founded by the co-founder of Ethereum, Charles Hoskinson. It was further developed by Hoskinson’s research firm IOHK.
Cardano announced that by the completion of Alonzo hard fork, the company had enabled a long-awaited smart contract functionality. On reaching the milestone, the firm said that its dream vision of building a decentralized system extending “economic identity and opportunity to everyone, everywhere” has become a reality.
The Alonzo fork has made it possible for smart contracts to be written for Cardano utilizing the Plutus scripts, which the team describes as “a purpose-built smart contract” language and execution platform which “uses the functional programming language, Haskell.”
Cardano has also urged its community to maintain decent expectations from Alonzo, saying that there are increasingly high expectations from the upgrade and “some unreasonably so.” It clarified that the customers might be expecting a “consumer-ready DApps available” following the upgrade, but their expectation needs to be checked there.
While Cardano has pledged to its competitor Ethereum’s dominance in hosting DeFi and Web3 applications, the project has already garnered criticism for being unable to deliver smart contract functionality yet despite its launching in September 2017.
Founder of rival platform Internet Computer, Dominic Williams, has also slammed Cardano for the extended amount of time taken for it to launch smart contracts, stating that although it has been in the market for two years, till now it has only managed to add smart contracts support, “and people are happy with this progress.”
Anthony Sassano, Ethereum maximalist, had also tweeted criticizing Cardano, saying that after six years of “peer-reviewed research” and “$90bil+ market cap later”, the firm isn’t equipped to do even “concurrent transaction processing”, which, Sassano pointed, is “the very thing you need for DeFi.”
To address the criticism on social media, Cardano asserted that DApps that are built on the protocol “are not limited to one transaction per block.”
