Cardano's native ADA token crashed along with most other cryptoassets today after Cardano's development company, Input Output, announced that the Alonzo upgrade for smart contract enablement has been completed.
The long-awaited update happened as scheduled on September 12th at 21:47 UTC via a protocol update called hard fork combinator (HFC).
After the event, the ADA responded by trading lower in the market and, as of 09:32 UTC, it had fallen 7,5% since the update and 9% in the last 24 hours.
The price is currently trading at $2,36, down about 23% from its all-time high of $3,10 reached on September 2nd.
By comparison, Cardano's main competitor in the smart contract space, Ethereum, has seen its ETH token drop 6% over the past 24 hours to $3.225.
And while the sell-off coincided with bearish sentiment in the broader cryptographic market, the move to the ADA was also characteristic of the “buy the rumor, sell the news” strategy that many traders follow around major market events.
In a blog post published shortly after the update, Input Output wrote that “the backbone for a new decentralized application platform” now exists in Cardano, allowing scripts to be written in a programming language dubbed Plutus by Cardano.
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 $ ISLANDS pic.twitter.com/r6QNvTv4pt
- Input Output (@InputOutputHK) September 12, 2021
Although smart contract functionality is now officially enabled in blockchain Cardano, some problems remain before they can be utilized in fully functional decentralized exchanges (DEXs) and other applications.
As reported last week, Minswap , the first DEX on Cardano's public testing network for the Alonzo update, became unusable for many users due to bottlenecks in the way it processed transactions.
And although DEX remains unavailable to this day, some other decentralized applications (dapps) have been configured in Cardano and are functional. Among them is a game-like dapp in which users are asked to help founder Charles Hoskinson “find a name for his lobster:”
🦞 Participate in the Lobster challenge 🦞
Let's use the simple #Plutus #SmartContract on #Cardano to help @IOHK_Charles find a name for his lobster!
Information and details on the GitHub repo: https://t.co/82bYfdT0Ii
- Input Output (@InputOutputHK) September 12, 2021
Still, not everyone is impressed by the progress of Cardano's smart contract (or lack thereof), with some members of the crypto community targeting Cardano on Twitter today:
Sooooo has anyone seen a Cardano smart contract up and running yet?
— Mark Jeffrey ⚡️🚀 (@markjeffrey) September 13, 2021
Meanwhile, the Cardano Foundation announced on Sunday that the Cardano Summit 2021 will be held in a decentralized manner in the form of local meetings in 37 cities around the world over the weekend of September 24-26.
