Cardano Faced Criticism Following The Alonzo Testnet Upgrade

Cardano faced criticism following the Alonzo testnet upgrade after some proposed flaws in the structures were exposed as we are reading more in our latest Cardano news today.

Cardano as the third biggest cryptocurrency by market cap behind ET 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. The DEX was the first dapp that launched on the test at the beginning of September.

Concurrency issues often pose in a way that prevents multiple users from interacting with a program or protocols simultaneously. In this case, the problem stems from the absence of the Cardano Virtual Machine which is a global state like the ethereum Virtual Machine allowing smart contract operations to proceed concurrently. As per the screenshots posted by Sassano, one user encountered a transaction error while trying to swap the tokens. Some of the community members were worried that Minswap handled one transaction per block which makes it inefficient.

Reacting to the apparent problem, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson stated in a video that the criticism amounted to a dishonest characterization of the project adding:

“The problem our industry has is it basically says well if you don’t support my thing or I can’t see a way to make my thing work, what you have constructed is absolutely useless, forever useless, and it’s just a toy. And then they use vanity metrics, not even understanding what they are saying.”

Cardano faced criticism but according to the creator, building a decentralized and scalable distributed system is a very difficult endeavor. In the meantime, IOHK published a tweeted threat on the misinformation about Cardano’s ledger approach and a Medium blog post also published by SundaeSwap Labs addressed some of the misconceptions as well. As per the article, it was possible to carry out hundreds of transactions per block as SundaeSwap stated that the centralization was one of the ways to solve the problems but the DEX noted that the issue encountered in teh testnet didn’t mean to harm Cardano:

“So to the people claiming this is the death of Cardano: unlikely. To point to one rocky experiment in the earliest of early days of an ecosystem and hold it up as the fatal omen of Cardano’s downfall is premature naïveté at best, and intellectual dishonesty at worst.”