Binance To Suspend Cardano (ADA) Transactions in Support of Alonzo Implementation

The Cardano upgrade to bring smart contracts on has been one of the crypto industry’s biggest stories of the week.

Despite the criticism from some early users, Cardano recently got support from the world’s largest crypto exchange.

Taking a Break

Yesterday, crypto exchange Binance announced that it would support the Cardano Foundation and Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) as they look to integrate smart contracts into the Cardano blockchain this weekend. The upgrade – dubbed Alonzo – has been earmarked to occur on September 12, and it will be a watershed moment in the blockchain’s history.

As Binance explained in its release, it would halt all deposits and withdrawals of the blockchain’s ADA token on its exchange platform 30 minutes to the implementation of Alonzo. The exchange added that trading activities for ADA wouldn’t be affected.

As soon as the upgrade is considered to be stable, Binance will continue ADA-based transactions. The introduction of smart contracts should make Cardano a more scalable and functional blockchain, with the platform hoping to play home to decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols and other applications.

Alonzo’s Importance

Support from Binance will definitely come in handy for Cardano, with the early iteration of Alonzo having faced significant criticism. Earlier this month, IOHK launched Plutus – a smart contract functionality – on the Cardano testnet. One of the first projects to launch on the testnet was Minswap – a multi-pool decentralized crypto exchange.

Sadly, Minswap ran into concurrency issues, and it had to shut its testnet down on Sunday. Users had criticized the exchange for having slow transaction confirmation times, with the service handling about one transaction a second. Some also pointed to Cardano’s use of “unspent transaction outputs” – components that help to track user funds.

While Cardano had refrained from discussing the issue, ADA’s price took a big hit over the week. Of course, the market correction played a part. ADA had crossed $3 for the first time last week, but its price plunged back into the lower $2 range over the past few days.

The developers have so far not said anything about the concurrency issues. But, company chief executive Charles Hoskinson has tweeted that the fuss is nothing more than people trying to create unnecessary FUD.

Investors will be looking to see how Alonzo’s implementation splays out this weekend and its effect on the asset’s token.

AnTy has been involved in the crypto space full-time for over two years now. Before her blockchain beginnings, she worked with the NGO, Doctor Without Borders as a fundraiser and since then exploring, reading, and creating for different industry segments.