The project also faced attacks after Ethereum advocate Anthony Sassano shared screenshots showing problems in a Cardano DEX.
Cardano: 64% of Stake Pools ready for Smart Contracts. Cardano (ADA) Stake Pools are preparing for the ‘Alonzo’ hard fork, after which Smart Contract functionality will finally be deployed on the blockchain. Meanwhile, the project faces harsh criticism for alleged structural flaws just days after the upgrade on the test network.
64% of stake pools are ready
IOHK, the company behind Cardano’s technology development, announced Monday that nearly 70% of Cardano Stake Pools, or participation pools, have been upgraded to Alonzo node 1.29.0. The IOHK team reported via a tweet:
“Impressive effort as always from the Cardano stake operator community over the weekend to prepare for #ReadyForAlonzo. Currently, according to stats from our friends at PooltooI, about 64% of pools have been upgraded to #Alonzo node 1.29.0. Now to keep moving forward!“
The announcement means that the project is reaching its goals on schedule. Cardano developers expect 80% of the clusters to be ready by September 12, when the hard fork event will activate Smart Contracts on the mainnet.
Like Bitcoin miners, Cardano’s participation pools are the network nodes responsible for processing transactions and producing new blocks and are the core of Ouroboros, Cardano’s proof-of-stake (PoS) protocol. These pools, which can act individually or as a third party on behalf of multiple users, hold delegated ADA tokens or collateral (stake) to maintain the network’s security.
Cardano faces criticism
A few days after Cardano’s update on the test network, the project faced severe criticism due to alleged structural flaws. Last Thursday, the Cardano team announced that Smart Contract functionality was available on the Alonzo test network. Said upgrade represents the step before the hard fork that will take place in a few days.
However, the platform is now under fire after Anthony Sassano, one of the most prominent members of the Ethereum community, made several criticisms of the project. Sassano showed a series of screenshots in a Reddit thread that revealed a concurrency issue on the Cardano-based decentralized exchange (DEX) Minswap.
The Ethhub.io co-founder and well-known Ethereum advocate highlighted that Miswap, which went live on Saturday, faced several critical issues after its launch. “The first DApp went live today on Cardano, and ADA fanboys are finally finding out that you can’t peer review to fix fundamental problems,” he tweeted.
According to one of the screenshots posted by Sassano, a user encountered a transaction error when trying to exchange tokens. Meanwhile, some community members were concerned that decentralized exchanges only handle one transaction per block, making them inefficient.
Hoskinson responds to attacks.
The popularity of Sassano’s comments on social media, which were quite harsh and even wished for a peaceful death (RIP) to Cardano, led many users to believe that the Cardano blockchain is broken and that the Smart Contracts, currently in testing, do not work.
Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson was not silent in the face of the attacks and called the recent accusations “noise” and “FUD.” During a live stream on Saturday, the mathematician and CEO of IOHK allayed concerns. They explained that “scaling Smart Contracts will require off-chain processing solutions of the likes of Hydra.”
“You can’t build these systems in a way that scales to billions of transactions per second on a single system. You have to divide and conquer, and you have to batch and preprocess. And moving things to different domains.”
In a tweet thread, the IOHK team also addressed the rumors, explaining what happened and addressing the problem. Some Cardano-based DEXs also came out to defend the platform by stating that it was possible to perform hundreds of transactions per block.