- The first testnet for the Alonzo smart contract platform launched.
- Cardano’s Hoskinson believes that the ETH 2.0 upgrade does not threaten Cardano at all.
Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) has officially launched the first testnet for Cardano’s Alonzo smart contract platform. It also unveiled the plans for the roll-out of the Alonzo project.
Today, we are delighted to report we have successfully spun up the first testnet in our #Alonzo rollout. #AlonzoBlue is our early alpha network, providing core Alonzo-node networking capability. 1/2https://t.co/z8shaZeIhq pic.twitter.com/Eg2t9PdM8x
— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) May 27, 2021
Alonzo is a hard fork meant to introduce new features to the Cardano network. According to the announcement, the launch does not establish the full roll-out of the project as it is meant to go through a couple of more stages. Also, each phase will be marked by colors. The current phase is the Alonzo blue. This will be followed by the Alonzo white, then the Alonzo purple.
Just as promised by Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, a small group of the Plutus pioneers and the SPOs would be selected to start the process. Though IOHK did not provide enough details, it is known that the project will take months to be fully ready. As disclosed by Hoskinson, there are plans to onboard more users once additional testnet functionalities and features are incorporated. This will be done by the integration of the Plutus script to enable the smart contract on the network.
The success of the Alonzo project will lead to the development of new DApps which include related decentralized finance ones.
According to their official website, Cardano is being built in five stages namely: Byron, Shelley, Goguen, Basho, and Voltaire. Each stage will center around a set of functionalities. The Shelley stage ensured that Cardano is brought from the federated blockchain to a decentralized blockchain. This made the community validators of the chain rather than the developer.
ETH 2.0 is not a threat to Cardano
The Alonzo project will put Cardano in a position to compete with other decentralized finance platforms like Polkadot, Ethereum, Solana, Binance, etc.
Cardano’s competitor, Ethereum will soon address its main problem of scalability with the ETH. 2.0 upgrade. Not just that, Ethereum will also transition from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to the Proof-of-Stake (PoS).
Regardless of these, Hoskinson believes that Cardano does not feel threatened by Ethereum. He mentioned that Cardano has a more stable PoS mechanism, and also, a different fanbase. Hoskinson in his recent video mentioned that the next 90 days will be the busiest in Cardano’s history.
I’m not saying 90 days after this video, Alonzo will be on the Mainnet. What I’m saying is the most critical engineering path, integration path, coordination path, and community path are for the next 90 days.
Cardano will in the next 90 days focus on improving browser experience. Hoskinson disclosed that discussions are ongoing with people in the ecosystem to promote a seamless browsing experience for viewing DApps and others. For now, they require a modification of the browser interface and write a new Cardano Improvement Proposals (CIP) in the next 90 days.
Credit: Source link
