Chaincode Consulting LLP
Sep 28 · 6 min read
Cardano’s Hard Fork Upgrade, Alonzo Takes Off
Cardano’s much-talked-about and anticipated Hard Fork Upgrade, Alonzo saw the light of day on 12 Sept 2021.This latest update marks the dawn of an era of smart contract capabilities for ADA (Cardano).Plutus-powered Smart contracts can now be created and efficiently deployed on the network.
About Smart Contracts
Let’s take a closer look at what smart contr a cts are, to understand a little more about this hard-fork upgrade and what it means for Cardano.Smart contracts are self-executing contracts that contain an agreement’s terms and conditions.The agreements facilitate the exchange of money, shares, property, or assets.They can be used to hold funds in escrow and settle complex deals.
Traditionally, whenever two entities enter into a contract, they use trusted third-party services to execute the agreement, and that’s how it’s been done for centuries.
However, smart contracts and various related technologies have automated what used to be a time-consuming, manual process.
The Alonzo Hard Fork — What it Means for Cardano
With the Alonzo hard fork upgrade, anyone can create and deploy their smart contracts on Cardano’s blockchain.
While the Shelley era decentralizes the system’s core, Goguen paves the way to build decentralized applications (DApps).
Although there is no firm end date set for the culmination of the Alonzo hard fork, professional developers throughout the network have been burning the night oil, working on testnets.
They have followed the etched road map with eras and defined milestones.Cardano’s roadmap is made up of five development cycles– Byron, Shelley, Goguen, Basho, and Voltaire, and we’re currently in the third.
We are now in the Goguen era (the primary development cycle), where smart contracts are integrated into the network.The Alonzo mainnet upgrade indicates a significant step ahead in the network’s capabilities.It signifies the fruit of six exciting years of toil by some of the most brilliant minds in blockchain.
Wider Accessibility Through Marlowe
Another fact worth noting is that the Goguen era encompasses efforts that increase the network’s reach, making it more accessible to a broader audience pool via Marlowe.
This special-purpose language is used for financial contracts on the blockchain platform Cardano.It permits these contracts to be written in finance language on the blockchain instead of general-purpose language.The Alonzo upgrade has paved the way for corporations and governments to adopt the use of Cardano easily.
Cardano will permit Decentralized Applications to execute smart contracts and record their activities by interacting with the ledger.
These digital agreements are expressions of a transaction’s story, specify where the funds need to go and the conditions under which the transfer will occur.
The execution of the deal will happen only when all the necessary conditions are met.
With the launch of Alonzo, Cardano will now support such applications.
Some potential areas of exploration include creating involved applications that support centralized stablecoins (e;g: track-and-trace applications within supply chains for product provenance) or escrow-based DEX (decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges).
With the token-locking function, users can issue utility tokens with specific vesting periods.It means they can lock or freeze tokens until a specified release period.Developers can now code various protocols and write smart contracts on Cardano’s mainnet, just as they can on Ethereum, Polkadot, Binance Smart Chain, Solana, etc.
Cardano’s blockchain uses an innovative, state-of-the-art mechanism in transaction verification, improving the network’s energy efficiency.It provides excellent price stability because it can predict transaction costs accurately, enabling developers to build various applications without unexpectedly high costs or the risk of losing transactions.
Marlow Is the High of Modern P2P Finance
Many business people interested in the blockchain field are familiar with standard financial contracts and how escrows work.
These people might be tempted to encode their contracts onto blockchains, but this gives rise to two problems:
Increased engineering costs to hire professional developers for even the simplest contracts.More challenging to convince all the involved parties that the code is a match for the contract they had agreed to There needs to be a more straightforward way of writing smart contracts (without the knowledge of coding highly sophisticated, secure programs) to solve these inherent issues while enabling broader adoption in the modern business space.The solution must be readable and easily understandable by all parties.Marlowe solves these problems.
The aim is to democratize finance by simplifying P2P agreements that operate on blockchains.
It empowers people to create financial instruments and interact with the people they want by setting up agreements.Marlowe has an impressive suite of unique products, each serving a different set of users and functions.
It is a vital milestone in the development of next-gen financial and banking services.These low-code, blockchain-based, easy-to-use financial agreements compatible with existing processes can help speed up mainstream finance adoption of blockchain.It will help democratize easy access to financial services for all types of businesses globally, from established organizations to startups.
The Marlow-Blockchain Connect
Marlowe runs on the Cardano blockchain, but because it is blockchain-agnostic, it may run on various other blockchains in the future, enabling a wider reach.
To interact with a contract that runs on the blockchain, the user must use Marlowe Run, the client app.In turn, this will interact with the user’s wallet to authenticate transactions involving crypto-assets spend because deposits are made through the user’s wallet, and they receive payments through the same channel.
It is essential to note that these actions have to be initiated by code that runs off the chain because they are off-chain actions.These will typically be in the Marlowe Run app and cannot be made to occur by a contract that runs on the chain itself.
Contract Simulation Support by the Marlowe Playground
The Marlowe Playground supports contract simulation, an omniscient simulation where users can perform any actions for any role.
This functionality enables them to observe the execution simultaneously from every user’s perspective.
This is the opposite of what users experience when they run a contract in Marlowe Run, where each participant can see the contract only from their viewpoint.In effect, participants can interact with only a running contract that is awaiting their input.If that isn’t the case, they will see that someone else has to execute the agreement.
Marlowe for Developers
Marlowe has an all-embracing product strategy, consisting of three streams — Marlowe for Developers, Marlowe for Enterprise, and Marlowe for End Users.Marlowe for Developers includes Marlowe Play (Marlowe Playground) and Marlowe Build and input to the Marlowe Library.The former two together enable financial smart contract development from start to end.
Developers can create smart contract codes on Marlowe Build, use simulations to perform preliminary iterative design, formally verifying and testing smart contracts last on Marlowe Play.
A purpose-built DSL (domain-specific language), when paired with the capabilities mentioned above for finance, makes it more straightforward to build verifiable, rigorously tested, and secure contracts.After testing, the developers can contribute them to the Marlowe Library (open-source smart contract template library.)
The Background of How Marlowe Is Implemented on Cardano
In 2020, Cardano launched Marlowe Playground Alpha, which provided developers the ability to use JavaScript (or Haskell) to write contracts in addition to straight in Marlowe.This functionality combined proof-of-concept oracles with the ability to access price and other external data from a stock market ‘ticker’ directly or data feed like Coinbase in the future.
Cardano published many tutorials that developers could use as guides to prepare for the rollout.Since then, Cardano has been honing this functionality, building, validating, and testing many other smart contract templates to improve the user experience.
Now, the Goguen rollout represents the completion of the Marlowe on Cardano implementation.It allows organizations and users to execute the DeFi contracts downloaded from contract repositories or written themselves.
What’s on the Cardano Horizon?
The rollout of Marlowe for end-users will continue in stages through 2021.
The Marlowe Run prototype was the first, where people could try out and demo their financial agreements.Its financial smart contract template suite allows users the ability to customize it to their requirements.
The prototype gives users the freedom to experience making financial agreements in a decentralized, P2P way, without the need for a third party.Users don’t need real tokens to utilize the Marlowe prototype and can check out the demo before onboarding.
Looking at the official Cardano roadmap, Basho is the next era in development, and it’s all about improving the network’s optimization, interoperability, and scalability.
In Conclusion
The Hard Fork Upgrade from Cardano, Alonzo deploys base-level scripting capabilities that boost innovation and further network development.This update has three color-coded phases- Alonzo Blue, Alonzo White, and Alonzo Purple.
The Cardano team will continue working on improvements, including compression of transaction script sizes and synchronization to optimize throughput on this innovative network.In the meantime, developers will have to deal with the inevitable glitches and remove bugs from every stage before moving into the next era..
