Cardano, a largest and most popular Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain platform, is going to activate Alonzo hardfork in mainnet on Sep.12, 2021. This release is going to empower Cardano with smart contracts functionality.
TL;DR
Price of ADA, a native coin of Cardano blockchain platform, targets $3 in meteoric rally. The upcoming release of smart contracts in Cardano is the main catalyst of this growth.
Amid savage criticism by both Bitcoin and Ethereum maxis, Cardano engineers released a very promising dApps development toolkit surrounded by a high degree of social media hype.
Cardano welcomes smart contracts, ADA price rockets
On Aug.13, 2021, leaders of Input Output Global (IOG, prev. IOHK), the development team behind Cardano blockchain, announced the date of smart contracts launch on Cardano. This game-changing functionality will go live on Sep.12, 2021.
This is the third major development milestone for Cardano over the last 12 months. In late July, 2020, Cardano made public ADA staking available: ADA holders became able to protect the integrity of the blockchain operations with their stakes. After that, the Cardano team started to reduce its role in transaction validation.
In March, 2021, all validators associated with Cardano team left its ecosystem: the blockchain introduced itself as the fully decentralized system. Shortly after this update, Cardano engineers started experiments with testnet implementations of its Alonzo hard fork that includes smart contract functionality.
Mentioned milestones injected new life into ADA price dynamics. At printing time, ADA is the third largest cryptocurrency surpassed only by Bitcoin and Ethereum in terms of net market capitalization.
Prior to public staking launch, ADA had been valued below $0.1.
Once the blockchain completed the migration to 100% decentralization, it spiked to $1.37.
On the eve of the smart contract launch, ADA price almost tripled in 30 days: on Aug.23, 2021, it registered a fresh all-time high over $2.97.
Thus, ADA is the top performer amidst all crypto behemoths of the ongoing phase of bullish rally.
What’s under the hood of Cardano smart contracts
Amidst unmatched euphoria around decentralized finances (DeFis) and digital collectibles (non-fungible tokens, NFTs), Cardano strives to make its smart contracts ecosystem the most comfortable for dApp developers.
Its consensus utilizes EUTXO model which allows to store in blockchain much more complicated data sets compared to that of Ethereum, a pioneering smart contact hosting platform.
To deploy smart contracts to Cardano, an engineer needs only to write a Haskell script: purpose-made Plutus Core compiler automatically converts it into the code of Plutus, Cardano’s programming language.
To ease the process of decentralized finances protocols development, Cardano team released Marlowe, a unique language that allows to create DeFi designs using only ‘financial’ elements. This low-code experiment is designed to facilitate migration of DeFi developers from different blockchains to Cardano.
Finally, the Glow language allows writing full-fledged dApps on Cardano, instead of writing smart contracts. In a nutshell, Lego-like experience with Marlowe and Glow, is designed to make the application development of Cardano as easy as possible.
Is it THAT important?
At least, this will be an interesting and challenging experience for both Cardano enthusiasts and haters.
Bitcoin proponent Mike Novogratz of Digital Galaxy called Cardano a 'weird cult’ while Ethereum advocates foresee that the launch of smart contracts on Cardano will be the largest ‘sell the news’ event in the entire history of the blockchain segment.
At the same time, it took an enormous amount of sweat, blood and tears for Cardano engineers to prepare this launch. Cardano progress is backed by an unmatched expertise of three teams: Cardano Foundation, Input Output Global, and EMURGO coordinated by blockchain OG Charles Hoskinson.
Cardano’s smart contract platform has every chance of success. So, the right moment has come to experiment with your own Cardano node. GetBlock offers shared and dedicated nodes for Cardano via REST API. Average availability rate for the last weeks is 100%.
Be the first dApp developer to work with Cardano node after smart contract release. Ping our customer success wizards in Telegram.
