Cardano (ADA) finally rolls out smart contracts on its first fully public testnet

Cardano (ADA/USD) has been a crypto project that has attracted a lot of attention this year. It launched multiple upgrades in early 2021, which made it inch closer and closer towards introducing smart contracts, and the excitement about the possibilities that this move could bring caused its price to surge.

Now, the project’s Alonzo testnet has entered its Purple Phase, according to the announcement published by IOHK this Friday, August 6th. Entering this phase is a big step for Cardano, as it brought it closer than ever to bringing smart contracts to its actual network.

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For the time being, however, the contracts are only available on the testnet. But, it should be noted that the testnet is fully public and fully functional. What this means is that any member of the Plutus pioneer program, stake pool operator, and even exchanges, can all join up and do their own testing within the testnet.

What is the next step?

Before the Purple phase, Cardano had Alonzo Blie and Alonzo White testnets. Alonzo Blue was limited to only 50 users, while Alonzo White could accommodate 10 times that number, but that was still only 500 individuals. Alonzo Purple, however, has no known limit.

The next step will be to deploy the Alonzo testnet on the Cardano mainnet, which will require a hard fork. However, the date of the hard fork event is still not decided, or at least, the team behind Cardano did not reveal it. The community should not wait too long, however, as the exact date should be announced in mid-August, so in about a week.

After that, it is believed that the hard fork might take place in early or mid-September, following a few sub-stages. This is IOHK’s rollout strategy, which the company decided to share a few months ago, in May.

For the moment, the company is still trying to decide who will be the main candidates for the node that will be launched during the HFC event. And finally, looking at the bigger picture, the launch of Alonzo will mark the end of Cardano’s Goguen era, whose purpose is to bring smart contracts to the Cardano ecosystem.