Cardano Smart Contract: Alonzo Purple to check compatibility on the first public testnet

Cardano’s smart contract project, Alonzo has entered the testnet for its purple phase. Alonzo Purple testnet’s success will mark the next stage of ADA smart contracts. Alonzo Purple testnet is Cardano’s first fully public testnet accessible to members of the Plutus pioneer program, stake pool operators, and exchanges, who can all join and do their testing within the testnet.

ALONZO UPDATE: We’re delighted to announce that we have now successfully spun up #AlonzoPurple and have today begun the new user onboarding process👍 💪
1/12$ADA #Cardano @CardanoStiftung @Cardano @emurgo_io @IOHK_Charles

— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) August 6, 2021

Alonzo Purple Key features

Alonzo Purple testnet is expected to extend the user limit radically. While Alonzo Blue only facilitated 50 users, and Alonzo White accommodated 500, which is a big leap but still a remote number. Alonzo Purple has not announced the limit yet, but it intends to see a vast expansion in the number of users, to help the Cardano Alonzo community move closer to smart contracts.

Cardano started implementing key changes this year through a series of upgrades to make its network pit against the likes of Ethereum and Solana. Alonzo Purple Testnet will check the waters to confirm proper functionalities and find issues with the hard fork if there are any. Upon the success of the testnet, the upgraded Alonzo version will be launched onto the main chain.

Hard Fork timeframe

The company has not announced a specific date for the hard fork. However, the mainnet date is expected to be released by next week, following the hard fork that is planned to happen at the beginning or mid of September.

“It’s an important moment, marking significant progress in the rollout of #smartcontracts on the #Cardano mainnet which is targeted for the end of August/early September…We want to ensure as many exchanges as possible are ‘Alonzo HF-ready’ when we hard fork the network… We’ll publish a page next week so you can keep track of this exchange integration work. And see when YOUR preferred exchange is Alonzo ready…”, IOHK announced on a Twitter thread.

Polygon bet against Cardano’s smart contracts

Cardano’s Alonzo Hard fork has seen considerable criticism. Last month, Polygon co-founder, Sandeep Nailwal retweeted Polymarket, betting money against Cardano to enter smart contracts before 1st October. Following that, Nailwal bet an additional $20K on top of Polymarket’s $50K bet. However, Alonzo Purple has announced the testnet phase, the Polygon bet was against Smart contracts running on Decentralized apps in Alonzo Purple, which is yet to be achieved.