Cardano: Alonzo Purple is a go after smart contract-supporting public testnet goes live

Cardano has kicked off its Alonzo Purple phase, as per schedule, in time for the launch of the Hard Fork Combinator [HFC] event. The update was first revealed by the IOHK team on Twitter.

The said update is in line with what was expected from Alonzo this week. In a recent vlog, IOHK Founder and CEO Charles Hoskinson had discussed the timeline for the event, with the exec talking about onboarding exchanges soon.

“A milestone”

Now, exchanges will be testing the changes, along with the infrastructure providers. They will also provide feedback to the team about any existing bugs or issues.

At the time, Hoskinson had said,

“Based on the feedback the exchanges are giving and the other infrastructure people are giving-they come together for a consolidated opinion of what is the best date of delivery based on the upgrade time.”

Alonzo Purple is a milestone event for the Cardano community. Especially since it will be the first fully public Cardano testnet to support smart contracts.

The IOHK team added,

“It’s an important moment, marking significant progress in the rollout of #smartcontracts on the #Cardano mainnet which is targeted for the end of August/early September. “

With a rough estimation of a smart contract being rolled out on the mainnet, Hoskinson believes that the exact date of the launch will be announced during the mid-month update. This is scheduled for around 12 August. As for the mainnet, the team is still deciding on the participating candidates for the node.

To optimize or not

Hoskinson appraised the community about these issues in his own Alonzo Purple video. He stated,

“We’re starting to make some decisions about what the mainnet candidates are going to be for the node that we’re going to include for the HFC event and there are some questions about whether to include some optimizations or not.

He added,

“If we include some optimizations the mainnet candidate node will be pushed a little further out, which will be a shorter period of time for the testnet- for exchanges to update.”

These optimizations will deliver additional benefits to the node. However, if left out this time, the optimizations will be included in the next hard fork combinator event. That will be sometime before the end of the year, according to Hoskinson.

Nevertheless, Alonzo Purple has begun its journey of bringing smart contracts to the Cardano mainnet. The team is also on schedule for the HFC event towards the end of August or early September.