Cardano is Gearing Up for its Smart Contract Rollout

4 min readAug 20, 2021

As Revuto hits new milestones, the third-generation blockchain on which our entire stack is built follows suit. Founded in 2015, Cardano is committed to constructing a scalable, user-centric blockchain that meets all users’ needs, and six years after it introduced itself to the world, we have no doubt it’ll make good on that promise.

From Byron to Goguen

Created from the ground up based on meticulous peer-reviewed research and a comprehensive formal development model, Cardano was the brainchild of ex-Ethereum CEO Charles Hoskinson, who sought to address the three strategic challenges facing all blockchain networks, namely scalability, interoperability, and sustainability.

An open-source, proof-of-stake platform developed by a dedicated cadre of academics, developers and researchers, Cardano launched its first version in September 2017 after racking up thousands of GitHub commits and hundreds of hours of study. This moment marked the beginning of the Byron era, the first of five epochs outlined in Cardano’s roadmap.

Last year, the blockchain hard-forked to its next major upgrade Shelley, an era defined by the pursuit of optimal decentralization. Today, Cardano is on the cusp of achieving the objectives outlined in the Goguen stage of the roadmap. Named after pioneering American scientist Joseph Amadee Goguen, this third era will see smart contract functionality arrive on the network, enabling decentralized applications (dApps) and NFTs to ship en masse. The final stage of the Goguen era is the Alonzo hard fork, which has the crowd waiting with bated breath.

The enhancements to Cardano have been a long time coming, but the anticipation of the community shows that their enthusiasm hasn’t been dampened by the delays. On the contrary, the forthcoming smart contract upgrade — which is expected by mid-September — has prompted significant inflows, to the extent that Cardano’s native ADA token has reclaimed the #3 spot on CMC’s Top Cryptocurrencies by Market Cap, behind only ETH and BTC.

Cardano’s team recently released Daedalus mainnet v.4.2.1, which includes updated dates for the Catalyst Fund6 voting registration, and it continues to work on Alonzo/Plutus-related changes (Plutus being the platform that provides smart contract language for Cardano). Lately, developers released a new wallet backend, finalized new transition APIs to enable Plutus Application Backend (PAB) integration, and updated all Cardano components to work with the Alonzo Purple node, which allows exchanges to start testing.

Finally, GraphQL and Rosetta upgrades are in final quality testing, and the team continues working on changes required for smart contracts. The much-anticipated Alonzo hard fork is scheduled for 12 September, which is when smart contracts will finally become available. Incidentally, Hoskinson recently won a $50,000 bet after Polymarket claimed the network wouldn’t introduce smart contracts by October 1.

The Revuto Era is Just Beginning

Why is all of this relevant to Revuto? Well, because Cardano’s smart contract rollout will enable us to take advantage of various DeFi features in the near future! We’re talking token staking, micro-lending, borrowing, and much else besides. Of course, this won’t happen overnight — it will take some time to test, optimize and unveil — but it’ll ultimately make our subscription management platform all the more valuable.

We’ve updated you on the exciting things going on at Cardano right now, but what about at Revuto? Currently, we’re focusing most of our efforts on further developing the mobile application, particularly as far as subscription control is concerned. We’re also in discussions to list the REVU token on multiple cryptocurrency exchanges and exploring new partnerships to further our long-term vision.

Naturally, we will be following Cardano’s progress in the coming weeks with interest, and we’ll take advantage as necessary to enhance Revuto in different ways. We can’t wait for you to see what we’ve got in store.