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Cardano (ADA) has made the biggest move in its history so far yesterday, September 12th, when it successfully completed its Alonzo hard fork, effectively launching smart contracts on its mainnet.
The move was announced on Twitter, with the announcement confirming the success of the upgrade at epoch 290.
1/2 Upgrade successful.
— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) September 12, 2021
Moments ago, we deployed the #Alonzo upgrade at the epoch rollover.
Welcome to the start of a new era for #Cardano $ADA pic.twitter.com/r6QNvTv4pt
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Of course, this is a big move for Cardano, but the project was quick to point out that it is still in its very early days. In other words, it only brought smart contract functionality, and now is the time for the true development of its ecosystem to start. So far, Cardano has only been creating tools that will lead to it becoming as great as it can be, and it is now the community’s turn to do with those tools what they like, and make Cardano the leading platform
The project said it itself, in its own words: “This is where the mission truly begins as we — the whole community — start developing on the vision we have all been working towards for so long.”
Cardano warns against unreasonably high expectations
While Cardano is still careful not to hype things up excessively, the fact is that it is already well underway of becoming one of the greatest projects in the crypto industry. It already has a massive, extremely supportive community, and it is already the third-largest crypto by market cap, meaning that it certainly doesn’t lack the attention.
So, its development is likely to proceed at great speed, which will mean the rapid surge of its dApp and DeFi protocol count, and not to mention extreme demand for ADA, which now finally has actual use cases, and the potential to reach a limitless number of them.
Once again, the project was trying all in its power not to cause too much hype regarding this development, even stating that there are high expectations resting on the upgrade, with some of them even being a bit unreasonable. One example is that Cardano watchers are expecting a sophisticated ecosystem of consumer-ready dApps available immediately after the upgrade.
This is, of course, not possible. But, thanks to all the work, attention, and popularity Cardano has received so far, it might have an easier time creating such an ecosystem, and its progress might be more rapid and easier to spot than it would have been otherwise, if the project was brand new.