100 smart contracts in first 24 hours as Alonzo goes live on Cardano

Cardano finally completed the much-anticipated Alonzo Hard Fork on Sunday, delivering smart contract capability to the network.

And the move seems to have excited investors and developers alike, with more than 100 smart contracts added to the blockchain in the 24 hours following the launch of smart contract capability on the ADA mainnet.

This is the onset of an important wave of adoption for Cardano – a project often accused of having no functional product – and will spearhead further gains as ADA solidifies as the third-largest crypto asset.

News of the Alonzo upgrades finishing has spurred the insatiable ADA price action, which in the past three months has seen Cardano ascend a 195% rally from $1.02 to a remarkable $3.01.

The emergence of dApp functionality on Cardano will no doubt drive forward Charles Hoskinson’s boundless ambitions for the project, which actively seeks to engage the developing world as the central use case and user base.

The IOHK team is already working extensively with the Ethiopian government to integrate blockchain technologies in national administrative infrastructure.

And this comes on the tail of a huge vote of confidence for Cardano which saw strict Japanese regulators gave it the green light for trade on Japanese markets – the fifth crypto asset ever to unlock this status.

Cardano’s Alonzo roadmap

The ADA team had outlined its Alonzo launch through a colour-coded roadmap, which has now been fully completed.

Alonzo purple was the penultimate stage in the upgrades and focused on smart contracts.

The final component in the roadmap focused on network scalability and network governance, and was colloquially known as Alonzo Red and Alonzo Black.

Successful implementation of those upgrades set the stage for the very last step – the mainnet release, which involved a hard fork combinator event following a public testnet on September 12.

The Cardano mainnet has now transitioned from what is known as the Mary era to the new Alonzo era.

Real smart contracts and dApps that interact with ADA and other tokens are now possible.

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