IOHK has announced the successful rollout of the Goguen “Mary” update, one of the two hard forks that will allow Cardano to transition to the Goguen Era.
The update was deployed to the Cardano public testnet on February 2nd to test in an environment as close to the mainnet as possible, allowing developers and users to monitor its performance and calculate the impact its deployment will have on the mainnet.
While hard forks in other platforms have historically been disruptive, sometimes even causing blocks to be lost, Cardano has a unique approach through a hard for combinator that doesn’t require a network restart nor results in service interruptions.
Cardano is Moving Forward
It is expected that the update will be deployed to the Cardano Mainnet by the end of February, depending on the results of the testing, allowing users to start taking advantage of the new functionalities.
In addition to the Mary update, IOHK will also be testing the new Cardano Explorer, an update to the Daedalus wallet, and metadata registries.
Named after Mary Shelley, author of “Frankenstein” and “Valperga”, the update takes the network closer to being the decentralized and multi-asset smart contract platform it aims to become.
Unlocking the Power of Native Tokens
It is now possible for developers to create user-defined native tokens that can be transacted directly on the network, also opening the doors for other projects to completely migrate or offer part of their token supply in Cardano.
Unlike other networks like Ethereum, Cardano uses a mechanism that handles the tokenization natively on the ledger instead of via smart contracts.
This means all tokens in the Cardano blockchain will follow the same logic and be inherently supported, instead of requiring the creation of layers as is the case of ERC-20 and ERC-721 tokens.
This means that all tokens will behave in the same way as the native cryptocurrency of Cardano, ADA. The only difference between native tokens and ADA will be that they can be created and destroyed, as well as that only ADA will be used to service fees, rewards, and deposits.
This approach will result in better scalability, performance, and reduces transaction costs, which will prove especially beneficial for Decentralized Finance (DeFi) platforms as it will reduce the costs associated with them, something that has been a big problem on the Ethereum network.
Cardano is Gaining Popularity
While the entirety of the cryptocurrency and blockchain ecosystem grew during 2020, Cardano was one of the biggest winners of 2020, with ADA gaining over 600% in value as the project’s development evolved and the Shelley Era was reached.
Cardano’s scientific and highly technical approach has raised support in the blockchain community as it would ensure the scalability of the network right from the start without the need for off-chain solutions.
The platform has been one of the projects referred to as “Ethereum killer” due to the potential it has shown in terms of performance and low costs, an issue that Ethereum’s team and users are aware of and looking to fix with the release of Ethereum 2.0.
Charles Hoskinson, Cardano’s founder, referred to the role its new project will have in the blockchain industry by stating:
“I don’t have to go and tell everybody that we are gonna overcome the great Ethereum Beast. I just let them do their thing, let them prove that they actually are as big as they say. We think we have a great strategy: get the on-chain/off-chain balance treated as a service-oriented architecture.”
The transition to the Goguen Era will allow developers to fully take advantage of Cardano’s smart contracts and tokenization, creating a whole new ecosystem based on scientific principles and scalability.
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