TL;DR Breakdown:
- IOHK has confirmed that Cardano smart contract functionality will be enabled on Sunday.
- An update proposal to trigger the hard fork combinator was submitted on Tuesday.
- The hard fork would mark the beginning of Cardano DeFi.
The long-awaited Cardano smart contract functionality will finally be implemented on the mainnet on the 12th of September. Input-Output (IOHK), the development team behind the Cardano blockchain, confirmed this in a recent tweet, saying the Alonzo hard fork marks the “start of an exciting new phase in our development as a #smartcontracts network.”
Cardano smart contract update submitted successfully
In the tweet thread, IOHK announced that the update proposal for the Cardano smart contract was successfully submitted on the mainnet. This will “trigger the hard fork combinator even on Sunday.”
Already there are Cardano smart contracts running on the testnet, including MinSwap and SundaeSwap. However, the successful launch of the Alonzo hard fork, via Cardano’s unique hard fork combinator (HFC) technology, would bring this smart contract functionality to the mainnet. It will also introduce compatibility upgrades across Cardano’s software stack.
With the Alonzo hard fork, Cardano DeFi will become a thing. “We’re on our way. Remember, this may be the end of one long journey. But it’s the start of an exciting new phase in our development as a smart contracts network,” IOHK tweeted.
Cardano concurrency FUD debunked
MinSwap, the first decentralized exchange to run on the Cardano mainnet, encountered a concurrency issue that meant only one user could interact with the protocol at a time. People began speculating that the Cardano smart contract can’t hold with such an issue.
However, IOHK recently addressed the claims, pointing out that Cardano uses a novel ledger approach that requires a different operational mechanism, unlike other protocols based on different blockchains like Ethereum. Already, solutions to the problem have been proposed, and some protocols on testnet were able to bypass the concurrency issue, including SundaeSwap.
At the time of writing, the Cardano cryptocurrency ADA was trading at $2.34.
