Cardano Smart Contract Upgrade Successfully Deployed

The highly anticipated smart contract Alanzo upgrade for Cardano has finally been implemented. InputOutputHK, the company behind Cardano, posted an update in the early hours of Sept 13 reported that the Plutus smart contract capabilities were deployed onto the Cardano mainnet via a hard fork combinator (HFC) protocol upgrade on September 12, 2021, at 02:25 pm PDT, in San Francisco, CA.

The stated “The Alonzo upgrade is an epochal moment in the birth of a new ecosystem,” in a blog post celebrating the event on Sept 12.

The Alonzo upgrade (named after the pioneering American mathematician Alonzo Church), was deployed using the same HFC technology used in previous upgrades of Cardano, marks the beginning of a fresh period of rapid growth. By allowing Plutus scripts to be written and executed on-chain, Cardano will have the backbone for a new decentralized application platform, enabling numerous DApp and decentralized finance (DeFi) use cases – from simple swap type apps to decentralized exchanges (DEXs), and more complex computational programs such as Oracles and crypto-backed algorithmic stablecoins.

Cardano now has the most decentralized, sustainable, robust, and advanced blockchain platforms in the world, run by a skilled community of stake pool operators (SPOs) and an informed and passionate community of delegators. Cardano also has a thriving NFT ecosystem, attracted by the ease and low cost of minting. With a roadmap for future governance through Voltaire and ultimate scalability through Basho and Hydra scaling, the future for Cardano is bright and will stretch far.