Cardano has made notable strides in the last few months. In the latest development, IOHK’s Marketing Director Tim Harrison, Head of Delivery Nigel Hemsley, and Delivery Lead Dimitris Poulopoulos revealed that Alonzo is now able to run smart contracts.
The IOHK execs, in a recent conversation, revealed that the smart contract is powered by a Cardano-programmed language called Plutus. The team also disclosed the implementation of a command-line interface [CLI] for writing “Hello World”-style smart contracts as part of the first phase which is also known as the Alonzo Blue phase. This entails only a limited set of staking pool operators and early Cardano [ADA] enthusiasts or pioneers.
Hamsley stated,
“Well, we got the [Alonzo] Blue network up. It is up and spinning.”
The project in question has teamed up with external teams, such as Altlabs, Eleks, Mlabs, Obsidian, among others in a bid to expand applications and support experiments from decentralized finance [DeFi] realm like decentralized data oracles, DEXs, liquidity, and staking pools, lending and borrowing instrument, all the way to crypto-backed stablecoins, and non-fungible tokens [NFTs].
Poulopoulos also said,
“It could be as simple as a transaction that passes back a ‘Hello, world,’ or a confirmation of a payment that has been made.[…] It means that we have Alonzo running smart contracts.”
Cardano’s Alonzo Roadmap
The team also expects that the next phase, Alonzo White, to commence in July this year. However, for that to happen, the Cardano ecosystem needs to make sure that the partners and pioneers have been able to do their “Hello, world’ scripts.” This phase could potentially incorporate 500 community members, pioneers, stake pool operators [SPO].
The final phase is Alonzo purple, which is a crucial phase is where the testnet will be made wholly public with all Pioneers integrated with the partners’ decentralized applications. The roll-out of the Alonzo roadmap is scheduled to be fully implemented by the end of the fourth quarter of 2021.