Cardano’s Alonzo Purple upgrade imminent as smart contract public testnet launches

In an exciting finale for Cardano’s series of Alonzo updates, the team behind ADA – Input Output Hong Kong – has launched a public testnet for the significant smart contract integration, revealing that the Alonzo Purple upgrade is imminent.

This is the first time there has been a public testnet for smart contracts on the high-speed Cardano ecosystem, the testnet is expected to host more than 150 developers and graduates of ADA’s Plutus Pioneers graduate program, as well as a number of exchanges ahead of a now imminent hard fork combinator event.

The testnet will become fully public once this team have been onboarded.

The news broke through a cascade of tweets on the Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) twitter account.

Standing as a hugely significant upgrade as ADA races towards the massive Hard Fork Combinator (HFC) event, the smart contract integration driven by Alonzo Purple will mark a major milestone in the series of nearly complete Alonzo updates to fifth-largest cryptocurrency.

Markets are reassured as the tweets confirm the team is fully on schedule with the Alonzo roadmap laid out by IOHK founder (and co-founder of Ethereum) Charles Hopkinson in a youtube vlog posted a couple of weeks ago.

This update follows hot on the tail of the Alonzo White hard fork upgrade as the team rapidly move through the Alonzo phase of their Cardano 2025 roadmap.

Cardano network’s Alonzo roadmap

The ADA team has outlined its Alonzo launch through a colour-coded roadmap, which has so far completed the blue and white upgrades.

Alonzo purple is the penultimate stage in their updates and focuses on smart contracts.

The final component in the roadmap focused on network scalability and network governance, colloquially known as Alonzo red and black.

Successful implementation of the upgrades will set the stage for the very last step – the Mainnet release, where a hard fork combinator event will transition the Cardano Mainnet from what is known as the Mary era to the new Alonzo era.

Starting on that day, real smart contracts and dApps that interact with real ada and other tokens will become possible.

“Our growth over the last year has been remarkable, and smart contracts are nearly here,” said Hokinson, while discussing the sheer size of the ecosystem work taking place.

The price action has responded well to the strong progress made by the ADA team, standing as one of the most popular crypto assets – especially after the previous bullish market week.

ADA activity has surged over the past year, with more than 650,000 staking addresses as of last month. The estimated amount of staked ADA is valued in excess of $29B, accounting for 70% of the total supply.

“Cardano remains one of the fastest growing, most stable, most mature, and systematic cryptocurrency projects,” Hoskinson added.

Many analysts tip Cardano as a token with significant future upside potential.

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