The March 2021 edition of Cardano 360 revealed some interesting information. Charles Hoskinson, the CEO of IOHK, had revealed through this over three-hour event that there is a rollout plan for the Alanzo hard fork. This hard fork will allow the fourth-largest blockchain in the world, Cardano, to have smart contract capabilities.
Plans For The Future
The presented roadmap on the event showed that the Alanzo testnet could be live and ready as early as just next month, with developers being capable of deploying smart contracts on the test net for the first time in Cardano’s history. These developers will be capable of doing everything from DEXes to dApps to DeFi protocols in general thanks to this. The so-called “Pioneers Testnet” scheduled to take place somewhere at end of April or the start of May, already boasts a total of 1,300 individuals applying to be part of it.
Following this plan, a code freeze will start in June, which will be after a few months of testing. This, in turn, would start the clock to hard fork the mainnet network and introduce smart contracts to Cardano at large.
Massive Potential For Cardano
With the Alanzo mainnet launch slated to occur somewhere in August of this year, an array of new applications could be gearing to go live right as it launches. One of the key selling points in these upcoming plans is an application written in Plutus, a programming language, that the Cardano developers have already presented.
This application would allow for users to swap tokens within the Cardano network, opening up the potential to make it compete with the Ethereum DeFi space, primarily its Decentralized Exchanges (DEXes). Of those DEXes, no name is more prominent than Uniswap.
Now, it should be noted that Cardano has had its fair share of hard forks, already, having gone through two Hard Fork Combinator (HFC) events within the past few months alone. The first hard fork, Allegra, allowed for tokens to be locked within the protocol and came into working order back in December of last year.
The Mary hard fork after that managed to bring in native assets to the blockchain, and was successfully forked back in March. With the upcoming Alanzo fork, this could serve as the final piece Cardano needs to enter the Goguan era.
Possibilities Are Endless
Time will tell how successful the project will be, going forward, but Cardano pushing to innovate its network to handle smart contracts is a very clear shift to try and remain relevant in the ever-developing DeFi space. Its decision to try and content with Ethereum, the gold standard in DeFi for the crypto space, means it will probably find some success.
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