When will Cardano finally receive smart contracts? Charles Hoskinson is optimistic that it will be ready by September at the latest.
Cardano has come to power to oust Ethereum from the throne of smart contract networks. But until then, the project is still missing a crucial component: smart contracts. These should find their way into the Cardano mainnet with the hard fork Alonzo, which the ADA community has longed for. Alonzo and the smart contract platform Plutus are currently still in test operation. As with every upgrade, Cardano also takes an incremental approach with Alonzo: innovations are introduced gradually and only after extensive testing.
With “Alonzo Blue” Cardano launched an alpha version in the test network at the end of May. The group of participants was limited to selected staking pool operators (SPO) and participants in the “Pioneer Program” for Plutus. One and a half months later, on July 14th, the Cardano company Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) announced the next hard fork for the Alonzo testnet with Alonzo White. With Alonzo White, the number of participants is to grow by further partners and further functions of Plutus are to be tested.
Now we’re in the white era and right now we’re in the process of getting people involved en masse and releasing the new Node version 1.2.8 which is coming soon. […]. The number of people on the network will grow from dozens to hundreds very soon. We have also started making some of the development partners integration test partners,
so Hoskinson.
Furthermore announced Charles Hoskinson the successful implementation of Plutus (specifically: the Plutus Application Backend, PAB) in JavaScript, the most common programming language on the WWW. This means that Cardano-dApps can also be used in web browsers and smartphones.
Getting Cardano into the browser and making sure it’s a great experience and bringing Cardano and the dApp ecosystem to the phone is a high priority,
so Hoskinson. The IOHK boss particularly emphasizes two technologies. On the one hand, the algorithmically covered stablecoin Djed and Mithril, a protocol for Cardano Light Nodes.
When smart contracts?
Hoskinson makes no secret of the fact that there is still a lot to be done before the Alonzo Hard Fork. The next steps include linking the wallet backend with the application backend PAB. Hoskinson expects this from the end of July. The Alonzo hard fork is scheduled to take place 4-6 weeks later.
On an optimistic note, August is looking pretty good. On a pessimistic note, September looks pretty good. The speed has not changed and we have not experienced any significant delays,
so Hoskinson. The Cardano founder still keeps a back door open, albeit a small one.
August / September looks pretty solid. Something could come up. For example, several members of the Plutus core team could be sitting on a plane and it could crash and they could get lost in the Amazon. Or unforeseen catastrophic design flaw. But that is very unlikely
Hoskinson is confident.