Examining Cardano's landscape following its latest offering

• Smart contracts on Cardano grew 22% on a year-to-date (YTD) basis.
• Cardano’s TVL saw a sharp recovery, growing by 17% in the past two weeks.

Cardano [ADA] developer Input Output Global (IOG) announced the launch of Marlowe, a new smart contract creation tool set, on its mainnet.

IOG also announced that the protocol was available in pre-production and preview testing environments and requested feedback from developers and early adopters.

This significant development was aimed at easing the process of smart contract creation and deployment on the Cardano network.

However, the news failed to provide a bullish impetus to native token ADA as it was down 1.48% on a 24-hour basis at the time of publication, data from CoinMarketCap revealed.

We are delighted to announce that @Marlowe_io has been audited both internally and externally by @tweagio, and is now available for developers to run on Cardano mainnet!

Marlowe is a set of tools that enables the development, integration, and deployment of #smartcontracts on… https://t.co/M5dMygDf7J

— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) May 30, 2023

The new era of smart contracts deployment

Marlowe’s set of tools is designed to enable developers to design, validate, and deploy smart contracts regardless of their expertise.

Using Marlowe’s suite of readymade, customizable templates, builders will be spared the hassles of developing the project from scratch.

Once templates are selected, developers can simulate and verify smart contracts using the Marlowe Playground drag-and-drop builder tool, before deploying it on the mainnet.

Apart from less expenditure, this would result in significantly cutting down the project’s time to market.

In terms of security, IOG stated that Marlowe has been fully audited at enterprise-grade level, thus reducing the need for individual auditing of smart contracts. 

Additionally, Marlowe was expected to provide further boost to Cardano already thriving ecosystem.

As per data gathered from Cardano Blockchain Insights, the number of smart contracts on Cardano’s smart contract platform Plutus reached 5,801 as of this writing, marking a 22% growth on a year-to-date (YTD) basis.

TVL sees a sharp recovery

The push to make deployment of smart contracts easier on Cardano stems from one of its most powerful use cases – decentralized finance (DeFi).

Cardano has been at the vanguard of introducing a number of such moves. It also strives to make the network more appealing for on-chain lending, trading, and borrowing.

As per data from DeFiLlama, the total value locked (TVL) on the chain went past $206 million at press time. This represented an increase of 17% in the past two weeks.

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Meanwhile, investors’ optimism for ADA continued to trend in the negative zone despite the announcement of the novel feature.

But the silver lining was the sharp uptick in Cardano’s development activity. This could help to sway the sentiment of the market in the near term.