Cardano (ADA) reached a major milestone in its roadmap on Sep. 13 as its blockchain launched Plutus-powered smart contracts as a part of the Alonzo hard fork. The Alonzo hard fork has been highly anticipated in the Cardano community as well as the cryptocurrency sphere at large. The smart contract functionality is meant to allow Cardano to become a platform on which developers can build decentralized applications (DApps) and even mint nonfungible tokens (NFTs). This milestone has been hailed as the point in the development of the network where the “mission truly begins.” However, the news of the execution of …

More than 200 smart contracts have been listed on the Cardano blockchain explorer following the Alonzo upgrade on Monday — but there’s a catch. As of now, the 200 smart contracts listed are in timelock and cannot be used by developers until they’re released. The Vercel App currently puts the number of smart contracts readying to be launched at more than 2,200. Smart contracts have been a long-anticipated feature on Cardano since its launch in 2017, and the functionality was finally enabled with the recent Alonzo hard fork. Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano and IOHK, said on Friday that the …

Cardano has announced the completion of its Alonzo hard fork, ushering in its long-awaited smart contract functionality. On Monday, IOHK tweeted that the upgrade had been completed successfully at epoch 290, facilitating the creation and execution of smart contracts on the public blockchain for the first time. Despite celebrating the milestone, Cardano notes that it is still in the “early days for the project,” asserting that now is when “the mission truly begins” in a blog post published on the same day: “This is where the mission truly begins as we – the whole community – start delivering on the …

Ethereum transaction protocol Eden Network has raised $17.4 million in seed funding from some of blockchain’s biggest venture funds, underscoring the need to address ongoing challenges facing the block production economy. The funds will be used to support the adoption of Eden Network among developers, miners and users, the company announced Wednesday. The network claims all users will benefit from its ordering rules thanks to an improved block production system. The investment round was led by Multicoin Capital with participation from Alameda Research, Jump Capital, Wintermute, GSR and DeFiance Capital. Genesis Capital executive Joshua Lim and Andre Cronje of Yearn.finance …

The bullish momentum across the cryptocurrency market continued to build on Friday as a market-wide rally lifted the prices of most altcoins and boosted Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) above their respective resistance levels at $51,000 and $4,000, respectively. The recent price gains seen in the altcoin market show no sign of slowing down, and several altcoins gained more than 30% on Friday. Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that the best performers over the past 24-hours were Polymath (POLY), Bitcoin Cash ABC (BCHA) and XYO Network. Polymath rallies as its “Polymesh” mainnet launch approaches Polymath is an …

The latest rally in the Cardano (ADA) market has activated a classic bearish pattern that threatens to lower its prices by as much as 15%. Dubbed as a rising wedge, the textbook pattern forms when the price consolidates between upward sloping resistance and support trendlines. Its occurrence typically prompts a bearish reversal, confirmed by a voluminous break below the lower trendline. The profit target during such a negative move comes to be as below as the maximum wedge height. ADA/USD currently ticks all the boxes for forming a falling wedge pattern, as shown in the chart below. The pair now …

Cardano blockchain’s native asset, ADA, reached a new record high on Monday as investors pinned hopes on an upcoming smart contracts feature that expects to boost the cryptocurrency’s adoption. The ADA/USD exchange rate topped out at $2.899 around 9:00 am UTC, raising anticipations that it would easily close above $3 in the coming sessions. Many analysts, including pseudonymous chartist PostyXBT, noted that the Cardano token had entered a “price discovery mode.” Meanwhile, David Gokhshtein hinted that ADA/USD might continue its bull run until Sep. 12, the day Cardano is going to integrate a smart contracts feature to its blockchain via …

The much-talked-about Ethereum hard fork finally went live on Aug. 5 after block 12,965,000 was mined. Dubbed “London,” the software upgrade will bring together significant alterations in Ethereum’s code. Overall, the code changes target improvements to the network’s transaction fee market, user experience and much more. London comes with five Ethereum Improvement Protocols (EIP), with EIP-1559 garnering the most attention due to the impact on transaction fees and miner revenue, which initially caused miners to push back, raising concerns over the protocol consensus and a potential chain split. EIP-1559 was originally proposed in April 2019 and underwent testing back in …

The London hard fork of Ethereum, which went live on Aug. 5, ushered in a new era for the transition to Ethereum 2.0, a complete proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain. In fact, the London upgrade is the penultimate step on the way to the final transition to PoS scheduled sometime in 2022. The upgrade got triggered almost on time at 12:33 pm UTC at the block height of 12,965,000. Along with the highly anticipated Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559, this upgrade brings four other EIPs to the network, EIP-3554, EIP-3541, EIP-3198 and EIP-3529. The main change that EIP-1559 brought is the management …

Ethereum’s native asset, Ether (ETH), crossed above $3,000 in an extended upside rally on Saturday, hitting a three-month high. Nevertheless, the cryptocurrency’s incredible move upward also boosted its possibilities of facing a bearish backlash. An on-chain indicator that tracks the total percentage of Ethereum addresses in profits predicted the said downside outlook. In detail, the so-called “Ethereum: Percent of Addresses in Profits” indicator by Glassnode reached 96.4% amid the ETH/USD price rally. Lex Moskovski, chief investment officer of Moskovski Capital, highlighted the metric’s capability of predicting Ether’s top. In hindsight, whenever the Glassnode indicator crossed the 90%-threshold, it resulted in …

Ethereum has achieved another milestone this week apart from the London hard fork, with a 90-year-old New York Stock Exchange (NYSE)-listed company changing its ticker to avoid confusion with Ether (ETH). Home decor and furniture chain Ethan Allen, which has more than 300 stores across the United States, announced on Wednesday that it had changed its NYSE ticker from “ETH” to “ETD.” The firm said that it has incorporated “D” to reflect “design” and changed its ticker to avoid investor confusion and solidify its online keyword searches: “We also believe this change will better differentiate Ethan Allen news from Ethereum …

Approximately 2.3 Ether (ETH) is being burnt every minute through the new transaction fee mechanism introduced in Ethereum’s London upgrade on Thursday. The highly anticipated London hard fork went live on Thursday this week, ushering in the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559 upgrade that adjusted gas fees. Part of that adjustment introduced a mechanism that burns some of the base fees collected. The total amount of ETH burnt since the upgrade went live is roughly 3,395 ETH, according to the various counters available. Etherchain reports an average burn rate of 2.36 ETH per minute. This equates to $6,596 per minute, …