Cardano Launches First Fully Public Testnet That Supports Smart Contracts

Cardano’s Alonzo testnet has entered into the “Purple” phase, according to a Friday announcement made by research and development company IOHK.

The new stage—which was preceded by “Blue” and “White”—marks a major step to launching smart contacts on the largest proof-of-stake blockchain.

The Alonzo Purple testnet is fully public, which means that all members of the Plutus pioneer program, all stake pool operators and exchanges can participate.

For comparison, Alonzo Blue and Alonzo White were limited to 50 users and 500 users, respectively.

Cardano will begin the systematic onboarding of cryptocurrency exchanges, according to IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson.

As reported by U.Today, the exact date of the hard fork combinator event is going to be announced in mid-August.

The deployment of the Alonzo hard fork on the mainnet is expected to happen by early September after several sub-stages, according to IOHK’s rollout strategy that was initially revealed in late May.

Presently, IOHK is in the process of deciding what the main candidates are going to be for the node that is going to be launched during the HFC event.

Alonzo will be the last stage of Cardano’s Goguen era, whose purpose is to make it possible to write smart contracts on the blockchain in the Plutus programming language.