Cardano’s founder shared his interest in Non-Fungible Tokens via his latest Livestream, sharing that the project would focus some of its efforts on NFTs and NFT marketplaces development.
While Cardano’s Project Catalyst currently has around 6 NFT marketplaces looking for funding at this time but Hoskinson shared his interest in providing financial and technical support to these projects beyond the scope of the funding project to further boost their development.
— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) March 24, 2021
Great Ideas Get Better
As NFTs continue to gather global attention in crypto and mainstream media, the integration of NFT capabilities could prove attractive for developers and content creators to move to the Ethereum competitor at a time when its next hard fork continues to approach.
While most NFT platforms are currently working on top of the Ethereum network, Hoskinson said he had been testing different NFT platforms running in networks like EOS and Algorand to get an idea of the different approaches and technical aspects of NFT.
Despite the increasing gains that crypto and mainstream personalities have recently achieved by minting and selling NFTs, Hoskinson’s testing was done via different aliases to prevent speculation and criticism that could affect his judgment.
According to the live stream, while copying the leading NFT marketplace protocols could be easily done at this time, IOHK has decided to approach several of the “top-10 marketplaces” to discuss the opportunities that moving over to Cardano could provide them with.
Better Functionality
The focus on NFT doesn’t seem to be on the short but in the long term, as the development team is looking to predict the status of NFTs in the next 5 to 15 years based on the different business models.
The Alonzo Hard Fork will Bring Smart Contract Functionality to Cardano
Cardano’s latest hard fork took place earlier this year and saw the addition of native tokens and babel fee functionalities, which saw the price of ADA spike to its all-time high of $1.48.
The upcoming Alonzo hard fork will be one of the most important milestones for the Cardano network as it will represent the addition of smart contract functionality, the heart, and soul of blockchain technology.
The possibility of creating smart contracts will allow developers to start creating and running their platforms on top of Cardano, taking advantage of all the functionalities its development team has implemented till now and providing added value to the network.
The Alonzo hard fork is expected to be deployed in the Cardano Testnet sometime in April of 2021, according to the roadmap shared by Hoskinson in the latest installment of Cardano 360.
New Ideas
Hoskinson referred to the Alonzo phase by stating that “to see something that started as a dream slowly come together and turn into something like this is extraordinary.”
Full Decentralization of Cardano Will be Achieved on March 31st
IOHK, the company behind the development of Cardano, has confirmed the successful submission of an update proposal for the Cardano Blockchain which will completely transfer the responsibility of block production to the community of stake pool operators
Known as “D-Day”, March 31st will see the “d” parameter reach a value of 0, which will mean that 0% percent of transactions will be processed by the network’s genesis nodes, marking the end of IOHK’s network of federated nodes.