• Cardano’s second of three hard forks for the Goguen era rollout, “Mary”, is scheduled to be activated on the mainnet on March 01st.
• The deadline for activating the upgrade process is February 24th.

After no concrete date for the activation of the “Mary” hard fork combinator (HFC) event was known until recently, Charles Hoskinson, CEO of IOG and inventor of Cardano, has now revealed the secret. As CNF reported, Mary will launch the multi-asset standard for the Cardano blockchain.

Just as on Ethereum, this will allow native tokens to be issued on the blockchain, with Hoskinson repeatedly pointing out the significant advantages of Cardano’s standard over Ethereum in the run-up to the fork. In his latest video update on “Mary,” Hoskinson revealed the launch date:

We have Mary hard fork coming […] So tentatively it looks like the HFC is going to make all the QA, all of the dev stuff on February 24th. So the following epoch, then the HFC will take place March 01st. So you have to trigger it in the prior epoch, it takes 5 days, and then we will turn it on. […]

We’ve been testing it on the testnet for almost a month now. Devnet looks good, exchanges are happy. We did a huge QA set. So rockets on the pad, it looks like we gonna take off on schedule.

If IOG can’t meet the first deadline (February 24th), the next date would consequently be March 01st for deploying the Mary upgrade, before the HFC event could go live on the mainnet on March 06th. As Hoskinson also revealed, Nodes and Daedalus wallet users only need to install the previously provided upgrade.

So it’s very easy for you guys. Just download the new client. You don’t have to do anything else – move your tokens, upgrade your tokens – there’s none of those stuff. You just download the new client. That’s the magic of the HFCs.

Daedalus Flight will be the first release to have the multi-asset interface. Hoskinson hopes for a release the first week of March. But it should be another two weeks before the multi-asset interface is integrated into the mainnet on Daedalus. “Expect to see it sometime in mid-March,” the IOG CEO said.

Cardano’s Plutus Pioneers

Hoskinson also announced that IOG will launch the “Plutus Pioneers” program in the next few weeks, similar to the “Stake Pool Pioneers” that tested and guided the transition to the current Shelley era. For the “Plutus Pioneers,” IOG is looking for people to test the first Plutus testnet and write Plutus code, while the release is expected “very soon.”

So if you are studying Plutus, if you are a Haskell developer or a functional programmer who would like to know a bit of Plutus, let us know, and we will see what we can do. And we might even set up a form of boot camp.

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