Cardano, the fifth-largest cryptocurrency in the market, has been one of the most talked-about altcoins of late. Not so long ago, it successfully pushed out the first testnet of its Alonzo rollout. Since then, anticipation for its later developments has been sky-high.
Cardano is in the news again today on the back of a conversation that saw IOHK’s Marketing Director Tim Harrison, Head of Delivery Nigel Hemsley, and Delivery Lead Dimitris Poulopoulos highlight the ecosystem’s latest updates.
Perhaps, the most crucial of these developments was tweeted out by IOHK, with the same announcing,
"The first simple Plutus smart contract has this week been successfully run on the AlonzoBlue Cardano testnet" – learn more in June's mid-month development update https://t.co/3WEQi9hqCX
— IOHK Media (@IOHKMedia) June 11, 2021
To elaborate further, the respective smart contract is written in a specific Cardano-programmed language called Plutus. As part of the Alonzo Blue phase, the first phase, it incorporated a command-line interface (CLI) for writing “Hello World”-style smart contracts. The initial phase of Alonzo includes only a limited set of staking pool operators and early Cardano (ADA) enthusiasts (‘pioneers’).
To support such experiments, the project has collaborated with different external teams, namely, Altlabs, Eleks, Mlabs, Obsidian, and other partners to work on use cases. These include a variety of decentralized finance segments such as decentralized data oracles, decentralized digital assets exchanges (DEXs), liquidity and staking pools, lending/borrowing tools, crypto-backed stablecoins, and NFTs.
Next couple of weeks…
As soon as this limited set of partners and pioneers become compatible with these basic scripts, the next phase will follow i.e. Alonzo White. According to Nigel Hemsley, however, for that to happen,
“…they have to successfully prove they can submit, validate, and execute on-chain.”
Not so basic after all.
However, IF successful in that aspect, Alonzo White plans to incorporate 500 community members, pioneers, stakepool operators (SPO) and bring them on board in July.
Finally, in the integral last phase, Alonzo purple, the testnet will be fully public with all Pioneers onboarded with the partners’ dApps.
As per the Alonzo rollout plan, the smart contracts are scheduled to be fully implemented by September.
Needless to say, with such developments, expectations are bound to rise and so should the altcoin’s price. At the time of writing, ADA was trading around the $1.39 price level, having witnessed a correction of around 8% in 24 hours.
