Cardano’s blockchain has successfully performed a hard fork, meaning Cardano is getting ready for smart contracts. In addition, a Polkadot parachain was raffled off to Phala Network’s Khala.
Cardano en smart contracts
Cardano has a huge roadmap for the coming decades. A small part of this is the hard fork through which Cardano entering the Alonzo White phase. This is one of the steps to eventually be able to roll out a smart contract on the network. During this phase, the number of testers will increase drastically and add more functionalities.
HARD FORK SUCCESSFUL: Delighted to report around 19.44 UTC today we successfully forked the #Alonzo testnet to the new #AlonzoWhite node. The new network is happily making blocks already. 1/5
— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) July 14, 2021
The first testnet was launched at the end of May, it is called Alonzo Blue. After the White era, Alonzo will be publicly available to all stake pool operators (SPOs) during the Purple phase. The long-awaited Alonzo hard fork, named after mathematician Alonzo Church, is expected to be deployed on the mainnet in early September.
This is good news for anyone who owns ADA, because that means smart contracts and all the benefits that come with it. Consider DeFi, for example, to compete with companies such as Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain (BSC) and Solana.
Find Phala Network on Polkadot
Phala Network’s ‘canary network’ Khala won the fourth Kusama parachain slot auction this week, with a whopping 132,280 Kusama contributed by 2,759 addresses. A canary network is an experimental environment for blockchain developers to build and test their code, products and services.
Kusama en Polkadot are two self-contained networks built with practically the same code. Kusama has faster governance parameters and lower barriers to entry, because you can see it as a kind of test blockchain for new projects. If everything is successful, you can migrate to Polkadot. Or not, that’s up to the project itself. In Khala’s case, Kusama seems to be the right place.
Polkadot is especially popular in China, largely because of the appeal (not physical) of founder Gavin Wood. He was also one of the founders of Ethereum. In addition, Chinese Polkadot projects receive a lot of financial support from the Web3 Foundation. Phala/Khala has an active Chinese community with more than 8,000 people in the WeChat group, nearly 20,000 subscribers and more than 2,000 people in the Telegram group.
There are a total of five parachains to forgive on Kusama:
- Acala’s Narura Network
- Moonbeam’s Moonriver Network
- Astar’s (formerly Plasm) Shiden Network
- Phala Network’s Khala
- ?
The fifth parachain will be auctioned later this month. All KSM tokens contributed by the winners will be locked up for the duration of the lease and the projects can renew their lease by winning another auction.
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