Cardano’s Alonzo Mainnet Upgrade Officially Goes Live Today

Cardano’s Alonzo Mainnet upgrade is finally live today after years of researching and producing papers on the network’s structure so, in today’s Cardano ADA news, we read more of what can be expected.

Cardano now has smart contracts capabilities to further bolsters its ecosystem because as of now, it saw an important hard fork finally go through and Alonzo is live on the mainnet. What this means is that the network will support smart contracts and will enable various teams and projects to start building and deploying their protocols on Cardano.

The network had the functionalities built into the Alonzo testnet at the start of September and one of the very important things to keep in mind when talking about the smart contracts is Plutus. This is a framework that enables functionality and the Plutus core is used to define the parameters of the extended UTXO model as it offers unique advantages over different accounting models. Cardano’s Alonzo mainnet upgrade also has the Plutus Application framework that provides access to applications and services which run on the network and includes a full web browser interoperability.

1/2 Upgrade successful.

Moments ago, we deployed the #Alonzo upgrade at the epoch rollover.

Welcome to the start of a new era for #Cardano $ADA pic.twitter.com/r6QNvTv4pt

— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) September 12, 2021

The rollout wasn’t without any hiccups. It was recently brought up that there’s a strong concurrency issue in the fundamental design of the smart contract capabilities of ADA which means that multiple users cannot interact with the protocol at the same time but Charles Hoskinson as well as the Input-Output team, explained the entire smart contract model of the network and how this wasn’t an issue. A couple of days ago, Input-Output published a new blog that explains Cardano’s EUTXO approach to the smart contract execution and how it offers much bigger security, lack of charges of the failed transactions, and the full cost predictability. In any case, the latest hard fork today marks a new era for the Cardano project and it will be very interesting to see how it will impact the ecosystem going forward.

As recently reported, Cardano as the third biggest cryptocurrency by market cap behind ETH and BTC came under criticism after the reports from the concurrency issue found on the testnet. The team earlier announced that the smart contract functionality was available on the Alonzo testnet and following the deployment of the smart contracts, the mainnet upgrade got scheduled for September 12. however, a tweeted threat by Ethereum proponent Anthony Sassano showed a series of screenshots that show a concurrency issue found on the Cardano-based DEX Minswap.