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- A stress test of Cardano’s Plutus smart contract platform will be conducted in March 2021.
- IOHK declared the release date for the announcement of the staking pools, which will receive support.
En route to full decentralization and the launch of its decentralized finance capabilities, Cardano is preparing to deploy the smart contract platform, Plutus. Input-Output Hong Kong (IOHK) CEO Charles Hoskinson made the announcement via his Twitter account.
Hoskinson said that the stress tests for Plutus will begin in March. IOHK is currently in the process of retaining the companies that will begin operations on Plutus.
Hoskinson further stated he would reveal the names of these companies and the challenge programs when the company completes the retention process. The code will then be released as open-source and work will be done “to find some canonical design patterns and best practices from it.”
As reported by CNF, the development of Plutus is one of the components of Cardano’s Goguen era. In conjunction with the financial contract language Marlowe and the new token locking functions as well as native assets and the ERC-20 token converter, Cardano will provide a number of features designed to make the network a strong competitor to Ethereum for DeFi development.
After the activation of token locking with the Hard Fork “Combinator” in late 2020, the Cardano community currently awaits the activation of the “Mary” hard fork. Hoskinson had announced the event for February 2021.
Who will receive support from the Cardano delegation program?
In late November 2020, IOHK also announced a new ADA delegation program for Cardano. With Shelley’s deployment, nearly 1,500 staking pools were created. However, IOHK seeks to encourage and optimize the formation of these pools.
Therefore, IOHK increased the parameter “k” to 500 and will withdraw its public staking pools. The new delegation program will redistribute 15% of the funds in ADA maintained by IOHK to “purpose pools” and “incubation pools”. These pools aim to support the economic inclusion, decentralization, and sustainability that form IOHK’s vision for Cardano. They will be chosen to increase the diversity of participants that make up the Cardano ecosystem to create “value today with social impact tomorrow”.
Regarding the publication of the list of the referred pools, IOHK stated yesterday:
Last year we announced our delegation program to support and incubate Cardano community stake pools. We’re now finalizing the list of pools we’ll support in Q1. We’ll publish it this week, ready to make delegations at the end of January.
