- During the March edition of Cardano360, IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson shared the company roadmap for the next few months.
- According to the roadmap, the Alonzo hard fork could go live as early as next month and will bring smart contracts to Cardano.
- Adding smart contracts to Cardano can be a big inflation point, potentially boosting its price.
In the recent Cardano360 event, which premiered 13 hours ago on the IOHK YouTube channel, Charles Hoskinson shared the roadmap to Alonzo and smart contracts. According to this roadmap, the Alonzo testnet could go live as soon as April, which is when developers will be able to use smart contracts for the first time. Later, in late April and early May, Ledger, Node, and WBE will be integrated. Finally, a code freeze will occur in mid-June after months of testing and debugging.
What does Alonzo do?
IOHK had previously said that Goguen would be a series of HFC events. The first HFC was last year and focused on bringing metadata and some structural improvements to Cardano, building the foundations for it to be a multi-asset product.
Alonzo takes The Extended UTXO Model foundation, which is partially already in the Cardano code base and adds it all in. And lastly, it puts the Plutus platform on top of Cardano.
As the IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson explained himself:
So, what’s occurring right now all throughout March and all throughout April is that integration into the node to get a CLI. Now, as that integration is happening sprint by sprint, partners are being brought in and these are alpha partners. So, they’re very close and deep in core to the company. There’s about 12 of them in our constellation and they’re running lots of acceptance criteria and tests and other things.
Then, when all these things happen, come the end of April and early May, they will be able to launch an Alonzo testnet. This implies that for the very first time, publicly, people will be able to write smart contracts and deploy them on Cardano.
Charles also emphasized that this is an iterative process and the experience needs to improve step by step. That is why they are planning to bring two large cohorts of people to test this network thoroughly. He says:
Today, I think they may have already presented and those partners are basically going to write a collection of test contracts and test scenarios and go and try to build some stuff like NFT marketplaces and take what we wrote with age USD and run it and so forth.
Will Alonzo be the missing link that pushes Cardano to the next level? Only time will tell, but the signs are certainly encouraging.
