Over 200 smart contracts have been listed on the Cardano blockchain explorer following the Alonzo hard fork upgrade on Sunday. However, it appears that the smart contracts are in a timelock and cannot be used by developers until they’re released.
Smart contracts have been a long-anticipated feature on Cardano since its launch in 2017 and the functionality was finally enabled with the hard fork upgrade on Sunday that made smart contract capabilities possible on the network.
Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano and IOHK, said that the DeFi space is “up for grabs,” now that Cardano supports smart contracts. He further stated that the winners of what he called the “second wave” of DeFi were going to have liquidity and interoperability, the ability to move multi-chain, and cost predictability.
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He stated, “We need governance, we need certification, we need insurance, we need regulation on these things, metadata identity… at the same time, you need to decentralize. The way we constructed Cardano was for that second wave.”
Several notable projects have smart contracts in timelock or are planning on launching soon. For example, GREED, a rewards token redistributing ADA back to holders, Liqwid, an open-source and non-custodial liquidity protocol for interest rate curves, SingularityNET, a platform that lets anyone create, share and monetize AI services at scale, and Cardax, the first DEX on Cardano.
READ: Cardano successfully launches smart contract Mainnet
Bottomline
Cardano is Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) backwards compatible and is hoping to attract DeFi developers who wish to save money on transaction fees.
The price of Cardano’s native token, ADA, saw a huge 170% price run-up since mid-July but it’s currently about 21% down from its all-time high of $3.09 at the start of the month. ADA is currently trading around $2.41 as of the time of this writing.
