The Cardano blockchain transitioned smoothly to the Alonzo era with the capability for smart contracts going live from 21:45UTC on the 12th September. This long awaited feature is one of the major roadmap goals defined for the project and is a very significant milestone.
Last night, along with many other community members we took the opportunity to sample a single malt and spend a moment to reflect and celebrate.
We’ve been with the project since the Byron era when Cardano was running as a federated blockchain, and along with many of our peers raced to register stake pools after the transition to Shelley when block production decentralised, spending subsequent weeks and months working to fine tune performance to ensure pools were secure and working well.
Since then the network has grown to be the worlds largest Proof of Stake network, a highly secure and environmentally sound alternative to Proof of Work networks like Bitcoin. During this time the community has also grown rapidly, going from strength to strength building many new capabilities and services. There are now nearly a million delegators helping secure the network, arguably the most important part of the system, all getting rewarded fairly for their active choices.
Tim Harrison (IOG Marketing and Communications Director) captures the mood perfectly in his blog post. We are at the beginning of a very great journey. It’s going to be exciting, and in places difficult. We will be tested repeatedly.
Today we take a moment to reflect on what we’ve achieved together. Tomorrow the journey continues.