Cardano takes another step towards Alonzo as first testnet goes live

Despite the wider cryptocurrency market correcting at press time, it’s been an exciting time for Cardano and its native coin ADA. Exciting, not only because of the bullishness of ADA’s price performance, but also because the network underwent the much-anticipated Mary hard fork a while back.

Cardano is in the news again today thanks to the anticipation surrounding the upcoming Alonzo hard fork, with the same reiterated recently by IOHK’s Charles Hoskinson. During a video update, the Founder of Cardano had highlighted that Alonzo would allow developers to finally build smart contracts on Cardano.

In fact, all of these developments have been in line with Cardano’s larger roadmap. The preceding stage, Shelley was a significant milestone for Cardano. Now, in the current stage, Goguen, Smart Contract implementation would be Cardano’s most significant development to date.

Cardano is ready for Alonzo

Days after the exec gave up more details on what to expect from Alonzo, Input Output HK, the studio behind the development of the Cardano blockchain, today announced the successful launch of the first testnet in its Alonzo roll-out.

IOHK tweeted,

Today, we are delighted to report we have successfully spun up the first testnet in our #Alonzo rollout. #AlonzoBlue is our early alpha network, providing core Alonzo-node networking capability. 1/2https://t.co/z8shaZeIhq pic.twitter.com/Eg2t9PdM8x — Input Output (@InputOutputHK) May 27, 2021

What’s more, IOHK also published the Alonzo Rollout plan, with the same expanding on what to expect from the initial phase in June to its full deployment in September 2021.

Here, it’s interesting to note that in order to increase transparency, a series of color-coded testnets have been assigned to each stage. An in-depth conversation regarding each stage was the topic of discussion during the latest episode of Cardano360.

Here’s the plan (step by step) with the timelines mentioned above,

Understandably, many expect the latest developments to have a corresponding effect on the altcoin’s price. At the press time, ADA was trading at the $1.55-price level, having noted corrections of around 8.5% in 24 hours.