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The past month was one of much anticipation, as the Cardano[1] community worldwide waited for smart contracts deployment to finally activate on the network’s mainnet. Amidst bouts of FUD and criticism, the Alonzo hard fork combinator event finally took place yesterday, bringing in “an epochal moment in the birth of a new ecosystem.”

In the early hours of September 13, InputOutputHK, the company behind Cardano, posted an update confirming that the hard fork was a success. In an optimistic blog post[2] celebrating the event, the IOHK blog portrayed how the future looks for the growing blockchain network. It stated that this is just the beginning of what it has been trying to achieve. Further, as mentioned in the blog,

“This is where the mission truly begins as we – the whole community – start delivering on the vision we have all been working towards for so long.”

Outlining the growth of the ecosystem, the post revealed that wallets staking ADA, Cardano’s native cryptocurrency, stood at 825,755 at the time of writing, noting a 35% increase since June. Moreover, the total value delegated to take pools was valued at $59.8 billion at the time of writing, which amounted to 71.4% percent of the total ADA supply.

The birth of Cardano’s developer ecosystem is also worth noting, as many projects are at different stages of launching on the network. IOHK revealed that 150 projects are developing concepts on Cardano’s Project Catalyst innovation program, and around 800 projects have applied for $4 million worth of funding. Apart from developers learning the Plutus language used for Cardano’s smart contracts, IOHK elaborated that,

“Scores of projects have  and readiness. Hundreds of projects have been actively working on the various Cardano testnets and privately-hosted solutions.”

Source: IOHK

The ecosystem map

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