Cardano’s Hardfork, Smart Contracts Versus Criticism, and What’s Next?

[ad_1]

Cardano is currently the third largest cryptocurrency in terms of total market capitalization. The network has seen substantial growth during the current bull cycle, bringing its current valuation to $ 76 billion at the time of writing.

Over the years, Cardano has received serious criticism of its approach where naysayers have argued that the billion dollar market cap is completely unwarranted for a network without usable apps.

For those who do not know, the project took another route in the market. Cardano’s peer review standard is loved by some and disproved by others, but the point is that the team behind it produced numerous papers and spent a considerable amount of time developing a theory before it went live. real work.

Nonetheless, the aforementioned criticism, to some extent, was silenced on September 12, when the network underwent the much-anticipated Alonzo mainnet upgrade – the hard fork that brought smart contract capabilities to Cardano.

Of course, just like anything else in the industry, it has been met with both serious criticism and passionate optimism – pretty much both ends of the spectrum. This piece aims to look at both sides of the story.

The Alonzo Hard Fork – What Does It Mean For Cardano?

As CryptoPotato reported earlier this week, Cardano has completed what is arguably the most significant upgrade to its mainnet – Alonzo.

Alonzo is part of the current Cardano development cycle. According to the official project roadmap, it is part of the Goguen era. Cardano has five development cycles in its roadmap – Byron, Shelley, Goguen, Basho and Voltaire, and we are currently in the third.

The main part of the Goguen era is the integration of smart contracts – which we saw happen on September 12 with the upgrade of the Alonzo mainnet – and this represents a big step forward in the capabilities of the network.

In fact, Charles Hoskinson – founder of Cardano – has spoken about it:

This upgrade is the culmination of six years of incredibly hard work with some of the brightest minds in blockchain and beyond.

It’s also worth noting that the Goguen era also includes efforts to make the network accessible to a much larger audience via Marlowe. This is a special language for financial contracts on Cardano, and it allows those contracts to be written in the language of finance instead of a general purpose language on the blockchain.

The focus is now on improving the platform and getting Cardano adopted by businesses and governments. – Added Hoskinson.

In essence, however, developers are now able to write smart contracts and encode various protocols on Cardano’s mainnet, much like they can on other protocols such as Ethereum, Solana, Binance Smart Chain, Polkadot, etc.

Not without controversy

Prior to being uploaded to the mainnet, Alonzo’s smart contract capabilities were on the network test network, where developers had time to play around with the code and test its functionality by creating various protocols and applications.

When the update was first introduced on testnet, however, the team faced criticism of a concurrency issue. These often manifest themselves in a way that prevents multiple users from interacting with a protocol at the same time.

In the case of Cardano, critics have argued that this could be due to the absence of a “Cardano virtual machine” – a global state like the Ethereum virtual machine – it allows for the simultaneous processing of smart contract operations.

To be more specific, a user encountered a transaction error while trying to exchange tokens using the first DEX built on Cardano’s testnet – Minswap.

Source: Reddit

As CryptoPotato reported, the team at Cardano addressed the issues in depth in a few chunks. During this time, we also contacted and a spokesperson for IOHK said that:

Pretending that Cardano faces a “problem” with scaling the competition is like claiming that Tesla faces a distance problem due to gasoline shortages. It completely fails to recognize that concurrency is handled very differently by the Cardano protocol compared to ETH.

Indeed, in an hour-long video, Charles Hoskinson went into great detail to explain how exactly the protocol handles smart contracts, as well as the challenges they attempt to overcome.

If a developer tries to transplant an application architecture from an account-based chain to an eUTXO chain like Cardano, they will face issues similar to those reported by the developer in question.

Cardano’s approach to competition actually delivers higher throughput with lower costs, up-front fee visibility, and no fees or loss of ADA if a transaction fails.

All the documentation developers need to understand and properly use this difference in approach can be found here.

Smart contracts are now live, what’s next?

There were arguments that the launch of Cardano’s smart contract capabilities was disappointing. Nonetheless, Hoskinson said that:

In 24 hours, the platform has already seen more than 100 smart contracts running on the network, with its first decentralized application also already deployed.

Looking to the future, well, as we mentioned above, the team will be working on further adoption of the protocol and its native cryptocurrency – ADA.

Looking at the official roadmap, the next era of Cardano development is Basho, and it’s all about scaling. It is an era of “optimizing, improving the scalability and interoperability of the network”.

SPECIAL OFFER (Sponsored) Binance Futures 50 USDT Voucher FREE: Use this link to sign up and get 10% off fees and 50 USDT when trading 500 USDT (limited offer).

PrimeXBT Special Offer: Use this link to register and enter the code POTATO50 to get a 50% free bonus on any deposit up to 1 BTC.

[ad_2]