On Monday (September 12), Cardano Foundation celebrated the first anniversary of the Alonzo hard fork on the Cardano ($ADA) mainnet.

Cardano Foundation is “an independent Swiss-based non-profit that oversees and supervises the advancement of Cardano.” It is the legal custodian of the Cardano brand and it collaborates with IOG and EMURGO to “ensure that Cardano is being developed and promoted as a secure, transparent, and accountable solution for positive global change.” Cardano Foundation “sets the direction for decentralized economic empowerment, working with regulators in different jurisdictions to shape blockchain legislation and commercial standards, and empowering the Cardano community to leverage the Cardano protocol to solve real-life problems.”

As Tim Harrison, VP of Community & Ecosystem at IOG, the blockchain technology firm behind Cardano’s R&D, explained in a blog post published on 12 September 2021, on that day, IOG brought Plutus smart contract capabilities to the Cardano mainnet via a hard fork combinator (HFC) protocol upgrade event. Harrison said that the “Alonzo” upgrade would “allow the implementation of smart contracts on Cardano, enabling a host of new use cases for decentralized applications (DApps) for the very first time.” Alonzo went live on the Cardano mainnet at 21:47 UTC on 12 September 2021 (i.e. at epoch 290).

Well, yesterday, Cardano Foundation said that it was celebrating the first anniversary of the Alonzo protocol upgrade

It then went on to say that since the Alonzo HFC event took place on the Cardano mainnet 3000+ Plutus scripts (smart contracts) had been added to the Cardano blockchain. It also mentioned that “nearly 30% of transaction types utilize smart contracts and volume continues to increase.”

As for the Vasil upgrade, which has been scheduled to go live on the Cardano mainnet on September 22, Cardano Foundation listed the main benefits it would deliver: scaling and optimization; increased support for DApp growth; increasing of network throughput, and support for layer-2 capabilities.

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