The long-awaited Alonzo smart contract upgrade has gone live on the Cardano, ushering in the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain protocol era.
According to Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), the company behind the Cardano blockchain, the roadmap to the current network design was a long and challenging one, starting from the Byron reboot in March 2020.
The Byron Reboot notably ushered into the network a robust and scalable code base on which to build on. This reboot was succeeded by the launch of the Shelly Upgrade that turned Cardano into a decentralised blockchain network from its original Federated model. These events laid the foundation for the smart contract enablement that will now position the network to compete to resolve some of the industry’s core challenges.
“The Alonzo upgrade will bring highly anticipated capabilities to Cardano through the integration of Plutus scripts onto the blockchain. These will allow the implementation of smart contracts on Cardano, enabling a host of new use cases for decentralised applications (DApps) for the very first time,” said Tim Harrison, Marketing and Communications Director for IOHK.
The blockchain ecosystem is a thriving and evolving hub for decentralised finance (DeFi) applications and smart contract deployment. These Apps are embedded with solutions that seek to provide alternative financial products such as lending, derivatives, and decentralised exchanges. With the growing adoption of these products, existing blockchain networks have been placed under immense pressure as the protocols are not scalable enough to handle the influx of users.
The emergence of the Alonzo Hardfork aims to lend more resilient support to the growth of the decentralised finance and Non-Fungible Token ecosystems, respectively. With the promise of a more superior protocol, Cardano stands to earn its place in the advancing DeFi world dominated by Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Solana, and Polygon.
The Cardano native token ADA has received a massive price uptick by virtue of the Alonzo upgrade. It is set to see more upshoots in the coming days, as more demand will be placed for the coin amidst a growing market ecosystem.
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