How Will Cardano Support Smart Contracts? IOHK Describes

Cardano blockchain is getting ready for an essential upgrade that adds smart contract support to the network. Alonzo hardfork will happen soon.

IOHK, the leading Cardano supporter, published a blog post to describe the details of new features on the Cardano (ADA) blockchain. It seems the main focus for Cardano is helping dApp developers create business-focused apps on the blockchain.

Smart Contracts on Cardano Blockchain

Supporting smart contracts means a lot in blockchains. Ethereum showed the world the capabilities of smart contracts and their effect on financial markets. Now, many blockchains are trying to provide similar and even better support to complete the decentralized ecosystem. But the use-case of smart contracts and dApps isn’t limited to financial services. Cardano is one of the most active blockchains aiming for smart contract support. A new hardfork will happen soon on this blockchain that adds smart contract support to the network.

Alonzo is the upcoming hardfork for Cardano blockchain that will provide the tools and services needed for developing dApps on the blockchain. It follows Mary that happened in March 2021. Mary provided the opportunity to create unique tokens for transactions on Cardano. Now, Alonzo will complete the upgrade by bringing smart contracts to the network. IOHK, one of the biggest supporters and development teams on Cardano, believes that new upgrades will make this blockchain the leading smart contract platform.

Transaction metadata, token locking, and native token creation brought many opportunities to the Cardano blockchain in the past months. Alonzo will add to those features by supporting smart contracts. According to the IOHK blog post, the next hardfork will happen about four months from now. Smart contracts help business developers, as well as individuals, to create dApps and even DeFi platforms on Cardano. IOHK’s marketing & communications writer, Olga Hryniuk, says about naming the hardforks:

“When it came to naming these upgrades, we chose Allegra (Lord Byron’s daughter) for token-locking and Mary (the novelist and wife of Shelley) for multi-asset support. Alonzo comes from a more contemporary figure, Alonzo Church (1903-95). Church was a US mathematician and logician who worked on logic and the foundations of theoretical computer science.”

Smart contracts bring many opportunities and business models for Cardano developers. They can create many dApps like NFTs, crowdfunding services, auctions, DeFi platforms, etc. Next to the Alonzo hardfork, the scripting language will be upgraded on Cardano. Olga adds that the basic multisig scripting language will be upgraded to Plutus Core for more secure scripting options.