Today, we have prepared a quick overview of those Cardano events that have already influenced the popular blockchain and the ones that are soon to follow
Major Сardano events 2021-2022: a quick overview. Source: shutterstock.com
For many reasons, Cardano blockchain ranks among the top 5 crypto projects in terms of market cap. Firstly, it is one of the biggest blockchains to successfully use a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. Besides, Cardano is greatly appreciated for deploying environmental-friendly and social projects. Finally, the platform keeps adding new exciting features which attract DApp developers.
When Cardano launched smart contracts functionality, the value of its native token – Ada – surged. It happened in September 2021, but the price had been rising since the event was announced earlier in August. So-called ‘Alonzo’ hard fork was not the first and will surely not be the last in the series of planned events on the blockchain. To highlight ongoing changes, members of the Cardano team often organise meetups and participate in fintech conferences, where people can find out more about the project.
Cardano eras
To begin with, let’s briefly sum up the stages of the blockchain development planned by Cardano’s creators. According to the official roadmap, these are called ‘eras’. Each era is centred around a set of functionalities that will be delivered across multiple code releases.
- Byron era: creation of Ouroboros – a proof-of-stake protocol based on academic research; delivery of the Daedalus wallet, IOHK’s official desktop wallet for Ada – Cardano’s native crypto.
- Shelley era: the majority of nodes shift towards being run by the Cardano community; the introduction of a delegation and incentives scheme, a reward system to drive stake pools and community adoption;
- Goguen era: integration of smart contracts; the ability to build decentralised applications (DApps) on Cardano; creation of Plutus, a purpose-built smart contract development language and execution platform using the functional programming language Haskell; introduction of
- Marlowe era: a high-level, domain-specific language (DSL) for financial contracts built on Plutus; combination of Plutus and Marlowe will enable a new class of enterprise-level smart contracts; addition of a multi-currency ledger; enabling users to create new natively-supported fungible and non-fungible tokens.
- Basho era: optimisation, improving the scalability and interoperability of the network; introduction of sidechains – new blockchains, interoperable with the main Cardano chain; introduction of parallel accounting styles.
- Voltaire era: introduction of a voting and treasury system; Cardano will be truly decentralised and no longer under IOHK’s management.
Currently, Cardano has already entered the Goguen era, but the work is still in progress.
Top events
Sep.13, 2021 – the Alonzo hard fork brought the blockchain long-awaited smart contract functionality. Smart contracts on Cardano can be written using the Plutus script.
Sep.25-26, 2021 – Cardano Summit 2021 took place in a “mix of virtual and live events”. Key talks were dedicated to Cardano’s achievements and newest updates. The team also presented new partnerships including ChainLink and ERGO, and several new program features, including the dApps store and Hydra’s layer two blockchain scaling solution.
Oct.3, 2021 – SpaceBudz registered the first million-dollar NFT sale on Cardano. This NFT Sale was a significant milestone for the network.
Oct.13, 2021 – the founder of Cardano Charles Hoskinson was invited to the World Blockchain Summit in Dubai. Currently, the team is concentrating on promoting its product in Africa and the Middle East. The UAE, particularly Dubai, is particularly recognised as a crypto hub for its welcoming stance on crypto and blockchain technology. The city has opened a new free economic zone for business offering, issuing, listing and trading in crypto.
Nov.3, 2021 – BlockchainUA Kyiv conference took place where Prof. Roman Oliynykov – a Ukrainian cryptographer – participated as a speaker. Oliynykov has been a part of the IOHK research team since 2016. He specialises in consensus protocols.
Nov.12, 2021 – Cardano representatives participated in Agri-D 2021 Convention – international online conference and exhibition dedicated to blockchain & DLT in agriculture and the food supply chain.
Nov.30 (or earlier) 2021 – planned Plutus Application Backend (PAB) upgrade is scheduled. As part of the project efforts to make Cardano scalable, the network will undergo an upgrade that will deploy PAB so that developers can build smart contracts on the network.
2022 – Cardano is going to enter a new phase in its roadmap, the Basho era. The vision is to make even micropayments feasible on the network and make fees predictable and cheap. In a recent blog post, the IOHK noted that Cardano’s focus going forward will shift to optimising. Along with that, the team is investigating and analysing scenarios that will boost network performance including block size increase, mempool size increase, script compression, and adjusting architecture for Cardano’s EUTXO model.
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