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- Cardano’s “Mary” hard fork is expected to be implemented in February 2021 and will integrate the native assets functionality.
- IOHK is adding consultants to enhance Cardano’s voting mechanism and governance model.
IOHK CEO and inventor of Cardano, Charles Hoskinson, is highly optimistic about the platform’s progress in 2021. With the end of the pandemic and the possible cessation of lockdown measures across the world on the horizon, Hoskinson hinted at “many deals and partnerships” as well as decentralized applications that will be built on Cardano.
In an update for his YouTube channel, Hoskinson talked about the decline in Cardano’s decentralization metrics: “D will be worth 0 in March,” he said. Thus, the decentralization roadmap is on schedule while Cardano will soon be able to celebrate that the block production is entirely in the hands of the community. Hoskinson said:
Shelley’s hybrid stage will be over; we’ve basically finished that stage of the project.
On the other hand, Hoskinson announced tentatively the deployment of “Mary” for February 2021. The hard fork will be Cardano’s second Goguen related hard fork after the “Allegra” hard fork combinator. The update added multi-token functions, while “Mary” will allow the creation of native assets on Cardano and will add the infrastructure for the extended UTXO model.
Cardano’s new capabilities have been designed to make the platform an interoperable network for building decentralized finance protocols (DeFi). The components that will allow this to be achieved are part of Cardano’s Goguen era.
In this sense, the CEO of IOHK celebrated the progress made by the team building the Plutus platform. Smart contracts that are created on Cardano will be hosted on this platform and will be used by users in conjunction with the hybrid wallet, partial delegation and other tools, as Hoskinson added:
We are working on our go to market strategy for the first half of this year for smart contracts, there are a lot of “cool” things coming out on the way. A lot of business deals, people want to come to Cardano. They are begging us (…). This is just the beginning.
Progress on Cardano’s governance
A week ago, Cardano’s “Fund 2” of Project Catalyst was closed. IOHK’s CEO said payments will be released “shortly” for the approved projects. “Fund 3” with an estimated value of $500,000, opened Jan. 7 to encourage innovation and decentralization on the platform. Commenting on this, Hoskinson said that similar funds will be issued more frequently in the future and added:
The voting experience will enhance and improve the group of people we work with for Catalyst. We are bringing in governance consultants (…) We will have one of the best governance systems for any cryptocurrency.
