• Cardano is kicking off the new week with a major announcement recently shared to its Twitter community. The network has just revealed that the Aiken’s alpha phase has launched. 
• Aiken solves a large number of problems for developers as its embedded features tackle a lot of the limitations developers currently face. 

Cardano is entering the new week with a major announcement for its community members. As seen on Twitter, Cardano revealed on its official Twitter page that the Aiken’s alpha phase has finally launched.

Excited community members have reacted positively to the announcement, as it highlights the network’s continuous progress. The launch once again spotlights Cardano’s position on open source.

Aiken is an open source Smart Contract language and toolchain. The toolchain was solely designed to aid in simplifying and enhancing the development of smart contracts on the Cardano network.

With the outstanding benefits that come with the launch of the smart contract language, developers are poised to have a smooth time on Cardano. Aiken solves a significant number of problems on the Cardano network and in turn, allows developers to work with ease.

Some of the solutions Aiken provides include the elimination of hard-to-debug smart contracts as well as low-level blockchain interactions. Aiken also solves the problem of difficulty in setting up, learning, and utilizing the Haskell Plutus platform. Poor interoperability with other off-chain languages other than Haskell is also one of the many issues that Aiken is designed to tackle. Cardano wrote in a tweet.

Plutus is challenging to use with other languages for off-chain code & teams can’t work with their usual tools & languages. Aiken leverages IOG research on Plutus. It’s interoperable, focuses on on-chain code, and simplifies integration into any off-chain infrastructure stack.

Aiken offers a variety of benefits

Aiken is easy to learn, and is purely functional and strongly typed, Cardano remarked. It is also well equipped with State-of-the-art features and is very well optimized for developers to gain a great experience. The process of integrating Aiken with other developer tools and languages is effortless and can be done with ease.

Aiken comes with many domain-specific conveniences that make the development process efficient and easier. Developers can expect helpful and quick compiled feedback, automatic code formatting, and language served with editor integrations.

Developers can also look forward to a testing plus benchmarking framework, Documentation generated from code comments, and an interoperable and portable binary specification format (CIP-0057). Lastly, Cardano denotes the next step for Aiken and its team. Cardano noted in a preceding tweet.

Aiken team will run audits to ensure Aiken meets the standards expected of an enterprise-grade toolkit. The journey to mainnet needs early developers & feedback to shape Aiken for longevity. Let’s grow the Aiken community & develop the open source project further.