Hard fork “Alonzo” is coming at the end of April

Even after the recent hard fork “Mary”, Cardano’s development status remains “Work in Progress”. Founder Charles Hoskinson revealed details about the roadmap on his YouTube channel.

Cardano is still in the middle of the large-scale Goguen rollout and has thus completed about half of its long development path. With the next hard fork Alonzo, which enables smart contract applications on Cardano, the network conquers the next major milestone on the way to a fully decentralized multi-asset environment. According to Charles Hoskinson, Cardano founder and previously co-founder of Ethereum, the developments are right on schedule. On his Youtube channel Hoskinson confirmed that the hard fork could take place as early as the end of April.

Next stop: smart contracts

After the Shelley era, Goguen represents the biggest turning point in Cardano network development. With the last Goguen fork Alonzo, Cardano is finally entering the age of smart contracts: users can now set up decentralized applications (dApps) on Cardano. The aim is a user-friendly environment in which “non-programmers” can also create financial smart contracts.

To this end, the developers already have the new version of the Node software on Github uploaded. The version contains therefore “significant performance improvements and numerous other minor improvements and functional enhancements”. The updates are intended in particular to reduce the CPU utilization of nodes and stake pools that process a large number of transactions. In addition, the new version would eliminate reward calculation breaks.

The version is intended to prepare node operators for the next stage of development. Consequently, “the focus of current development work is on completing and integrating support for the Alonzo era”.

Cardano investment arm pumps half a billion US dollars into COTI

In addition, cFund, the investment arm behind Cardano, has the first investment proclaimed. A total of 500 million US dollars has flowed to the payment service provider COTI in several financing rounds. FinTech has been working with Cardano developers for a long time and has the first version of the ADA Pay payment solution in 2019 developed.

We have great respect for the COTI team and we look forward to deepening our relationship with this investment. COTI has been a great partner on several projects and we plan to leverage their advanced fintech architecture to enable future financial applications on ADA,

comments Charles Hoskinson. Accordingly, further projects are already being planned for 2021.

The intermediate status reports from Hoskinson have meanwhile given the ADA course a small boost. At the time of going to press, the cryptocurrency is turning 0.8 percent up on a daily basis, climbing to $ 1.21. The closer the next hard fork gets, the more investors’ expectations are likely to be factored into the ADA price.