Cardano has successfully and timely finalized the long-awaited Alonzo hardfork. 

The first-time launch of the smart contracts in blockchain at epoch 290 was confirmed on Monday by Cardano via Twitter. 

1/2 Upgrade successful.

Moments ago, we deployed the #Alonzo upgrade at the epoch rollover.

Welcome to the start of a new era for #Cardano $ADA pic.twitter.com/r6QNvTv4pt

— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) September 12, 2021

Even though this accomplishment was appropriately commemorated, Cardano revealed that these are the first days of the project and now is when the full-on mission is initiated, per a blog post on Input-Output.

“This is where the mission truly begins as we – the whole community – start delivering on the vision we have all been working towards for so long.”

Cardano also deliberated on how the newest launch is going to provide opportunities for everyone everywhere to be part of its decentralized system. 

Plutus scripts, which the company describes as “a purpose-built smart contract development language and execution platform utilizing the functional programming language Haskell,” may now be used to write smart contracts for Cardano thanks to the Alonzo hardfork.

Nonetheless, Cardano has urged users to have realistic expectations regarding the latest launch, by declaring that: 

“There are high expectations resting on this upgrade. Some unreasonably so. Cardano watchers may be expecting a sophisticated ecosystem of consumer-ready DApps available immediately after the upgrade. Expectations need to be managed here.”

Related: Binance Bolsters Cardano’s Much-Anticipated Upgrade

Cardano promised to challenge Ethereum’s dominance in hosting decentralized finance (DeFi) and Web3 applications, however, despite launching in September 2017, the project has been chastised for failing to implement smart contract capabilities.

“It amazes me that this chain had been in the market for 2 years, and is only just adding support for smart contracts, and people are happy with this progress”, said Dominic Williams, the founder of competing platform Internet Computer, criticizing Cardano for the length of time it took for the protocol to create smart contracts.

Cardano also faced backlash in early September when the first DApp to launch on its test network suffered into problems with failed processing of concurrent transactions. 

Anthony Sassano, the forthright crypto maximalist tweeted the following: 

The first dapp went live on Cardano today and ADA fanboys are finally discovering that you can't peer review your way out of fundamental issues. pic.twitter.com/tYQXNcVKGN

— sassal.eth 🦇🔊🐼 (@sassal0x) September 4, 2021

Cardano has responded to the critiques in kind by claiming that DApps developed on the platform are not restricted to one transaction for one block.

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