Cardano Smart Contract scheduled to launch on September 12

The long-awaited Alonzo smart contract hard fork mainnet launch is scheduled for the 12th of September 2021. The date was confirmed by an IOHK mid-month update done by Tim Harrison, the Marketing & Communications Director of IOHK, Nigel Hemsley, the Head of Delivery & Projects at IOHK and Kevin Hammond, a software engineer at IOHK.

What you should know

The Cardano team gave an update on the Alonzo purple testnet stating, “We have increased the community, we have invited another 300 pioneers. We are aiming that in the purple stage, we will end up with over 500 community members working with our network and working with our smart contracts.”

In the update, Nigel Hemsley talked about critical components that have to be ready first and how they are bringing them up to speed. They include; DB-Sync, Cardano wallet, Rosetta API, Graph QL and Explorer. There are 140 different exchanges that have listed ADA on their marketplace.

What is coming next?

On the 16th of August, a final H/F Plutus core mainnet release, mainnet candidate node release and Daedalus wallet release for testnet are scheduled to be done on this day.
On the 23rd of August, an upgrade for the Cardano wallet updated node will be done followed by an update on the Daedalus wallet to Cardano wallet mainnet candidate.
On the 1st of September, the Cardano testnet will be hard forked. Once this is done, a test on the testnet will be done. People will get to run the smart contract like pre-production and once satisfied, Cardano will move for the mainnet launch. This is also the final step for exchanges to move from purple to the pre-production environment where they get to test their own set up.
On the 12th of September, after the testnet is hard forked and all testing is satisfactory, the complete smart contract will be hard forked on this day.

Bottomline

The price of ADA has been rallying on excitement for the mainnet launch. In less than four weeks, ADA has appreciated over 100% from trading $1 to current stand above the $2 trading zone. Asides from Cardano, other major altcoins like Ether, XRP, BNB and Dogecoin have been posting double-digit gains over the last 7 days.