• The Cardano blockchain is seeing strong interest from developers to launch smart contracts.
• With this, the Cardano blockchain is preparing itself for the second wave of DeFi.

Earlier this week, the Cardano (ADA) blockchain underwent one of the most important upgrades with the Alonzo hardfork. The upgrade introduced the important functionality of smart contracts to the Cardano blockchain.

So far, more than 200 smart contracts have been listed on the Cardano blockchain explorer. However, these 200 smart contracts are currently in the timelock and cannot be used by the developers until they are released. Also, as per the Vercel app, more than 2,300 smart contracts are getting ready for launch.

On Friday, September 17, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson said that the decentralized finance (DeFi) is “up for the grabs”. The statement comes as the founder expresses his confidence in the release of the smart contracts.

The second wave of DeFi

Amid the rapidly emerging Defi space, regulators have been getting keen on initiating scrutiny. Gary Gensler, chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said that the Defi projects won’t be exempt from the regulations. Besides, the SEC also initiated an investigation into one of the biggest DeFi platforms Uniswap.

Hoskinson believes that the winners of the “second wave” of DeFi will have enough liquidity and interoperability. Besides, they will have the ability to move multi-chain and have cost predictability. Hoskinson added:

We need governance, we need certification, we need insurance, we need regulation on these things, metadata identity… at the same time, you need to decentralize. The next wave of [DeFi] will do that with a straight face and will be significantly harder to regulate in a traditional sense. The way we constructed Cardano was for that second wave.

Cardano noted that it will be compatible with the Ethereum-Virtual-Machine (EVM). With this, it also aims to attract DeFi developers who want to save money on transaction costs. Cardano hasn’t been there during the first wave of DeFi. Thus, it is banking on the second wave.

Cardano founder Hoskinson is ensuring all necessary developments to cater to the next DeFi revolution. However, Hoskinson went tough about the rapid growth in the NFT market currently. Speaking on a podcast with Forkast, Hoskinson said:

There’s also money laundering considerations that are occurring. So there’s a lot of evidence the Treasury Department’s been tracking where people are basically using NFTs as a mechanism to legitimize unlawful funds. So just create an NFT, you buy it from yourself, you say it came from someone else. ‘Oh, look, this picture of a stone sold for $5 million and I just made it out of nowhere. I have no idea who the counterparty is.’ Actually, it was you. This kind of stuff happens. So all that’s getting sorted and the way we constructed Cardano is we have a lot of stuff. The same things that make RealFi work really well are going to be really great for NFT curation creation.