Cardano's Ethereum Sidechain Goes Live in Public Testnet

As announced by Cardano developer Input Output, following the release of a toolkit for building sidechains, a public test network of the proof-of-concept sidechain built on Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is now live.

As clarified, the proof-of-concept test network is ephemeral and will be reset periodically during the pilot phase. All interested community members and stake pool operators on Cardano are invited to connect their wallets, test the network and interact with smart contracts and decentralized applications.

This is not the first such solution that combines the Ethereum and Cardano networks. For example, Milkomeda, Cardano's EVM-compatible sidechain, has been operating successfully on the main network for quite some time. To date, 9.42 million transactions have passed through the network, with the number of wallets being 111,441.

However, the newly released sidechain was the first Ethereum compatible network to be developed directly by Input Output. Previously, the ability to develop such solutions was touted as one of the benefits that came with Vasil hard fork.

Compatibility Festival

The release of the Ethereum-compatible sidechain comes in the same week as the forthcoming update of the cryptographic primitives for the Plutus programming language, which is used to write Cardano smart contracts.

Overall, we can see that Cardano's development and direction are focused on increasing its interoperability and cross-chain compatibility. Given the growing number of blockchains of all sorts, networks of different layers and the technical complexity of the entire industry, it can be assumed that the demand is being felt correctly.