Cardano’s Alonzo Upgrade Is Live

On September 12, IOHK, the developing team of the Cardano network, announced that the long-awaited Alonzo upgrade had been deployed successfully. The creation and execution of smart contracts on the public blockchain will now be possible, “the start of a new era” as the developers note.

1/2 Upgrade successful.

Moments ago, we deployed the #Alonzo upgrade at the epoch rollover.

Welcome to the start of a new era for #Cardano $ADA pic.twitter.com/r6QNvTv4pt

— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) September 12, 2021

Although still in its early days, Cardano notes in a blog post that their mission has truly begun with its Alonzo hard fork.

“This is where the mission truly begins as we – the whole community – start delivering on the vision we have all been working towards for so long. Building a decentralized system that extends economic identity and opportunity to everyone, everywhere.”

With Alonzo in place, smart contracts can be written for Cardano using Plutus scripts. These scripts are described by IOHK as “a purpose-built smart contract development language and execution platform using the functional programming language Haskell.”

Although the upgrade brings high expectations, the Cardano team advises the community to remain grounded, stating:

“There are high expectations resting on this upgrade. Some unreasonably so. Cardano watchers may be expecting a sophisticated ecosystem of consumer-ready DApps available immediately after the upgrade. Expectations need to be managed here.”

While Cardano pledged to rival Ethereum’s position in hosting decentralized finance (DeFi) and Web3 applications, the project has received a lot criticism for only being able to bring smart contract functionality until now.

Well, Cardano can’t even host smart contracts yet, let alone run them at web-speed, with infinite on-chain capacity, in a way that allows them to serve web pages directly to end-users. It’s many R&D years behind the Internet Computer in practice. And it primarily runs on cloud

— Dominic Williams ∞ (@dominic_w) July 23, 2021

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