Cardano before smart contracts: Alarm news and high developer activity

As early as September 12, 2021, the cryptocurrency Cardano (ADA) will see the launch of the long-awaited smart contracts, thanks to which this blockchain can become a full-fledged competition of the Ethereum smartchain. Shortly before this important moment, however, there were reports that the solution for smart contracts on this platform does not meet the expectations of developers, or is said to be wrong.

FUD regarding smart contracts and transactions

Just a few days before the arrival of the smart contracts, a big storm around Cardano provoked the claims of the project’s development team Minswap, who tried to launch his own decentralized exchange on a public test similar to Uniswap of ETH. Their ambition was to become the very first DEX on Cardano (which could be a completely prestigious affair). This week, however, they announced that they had to end their development prematurely due to the so-called “Concurrency issue“, which consists in the fact that within one block only one user or transaction can communicate with a smart contract.

This news was used to spread FUD (alarm news) that the solution for smart contracts on Cardano is flawed. However, the developers of Minswap themselves later pointed out that this was not a bug in the system itself. The problem is simply that working with smart contracts at Cardano requires a different approach than at ETH. “It is a problem that must be overcome by any development team that will build defi protocols on Cardano. It’s not a major mistake, it’s just a design challenge that has to be tackled. “ they stated.

What happened during Minswap testnet, and our plan moving forward 👇https://t.co/2OPfmTwEA7

– Minswap | FISO live! 🚀 (@MinswapDEX) September 7, 2021

Eric Wall, Arcane Assets, chief investment officer, subsequently said Cardano was not built for the current defi environment, which could also have sparked a new wave of criticism of the currently third most valuable cryptocurrency.

Sundaeswap is said to have dealt with the problems

The reputation of smart contracts for Cardano tests was subsequently improved by another development team behind the project Sundaeswap, which is another decentralized exchange that should be launched on the Cardano Mainnet shortly after September 12th. Its developers said that the problem that the Minswap developers had was successfully solved by their team, and at the same time they refuted the claim that Cardano could handle only one transaction per block.

“In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Cardano allows many hundreds of transactions per block. The rumors about Cardano’s death were largely exaggerated. “ said Sundaeswap developers.

In light of the recent controversy regarding #Cardano‘s eUTXO model & concurrency, we wrote an article clarifying misconceptions and propose a few solutions.

Grab your sundaes & get cozy, it’s a long one! Spread this far & wide, #Cardano Community! 🍨https://t.co/JLrIEu84MK pic.twitter.com/Qd5Iu8bgGs

– SundaeSwap Labs 🍨 (@SundaeSwap) September 4, 2021

Where is the problem?

It is not at all easy to explain in simplicity the differences between the smart contracts at Cardano and ETH.

In short, perhaps it is enough to state that Cardano uses the so-called Extended UTxO (EUTxO) a model that uses BTC, for example. However, ETH uses a different approach in the form balance sheets, to which current developers of smart contracts have become accustomed. This means that building defi projects on Cardano needs to be approached differently.

The main face of Cardano Charles Hoskinson in response to alarm messages stressed the use of the model Extended UTxO information has long been known about Cardano smart contracts, and developers simply had to reckon with that. This is not a system error, but just a different approach, which will turn out to be better over time. At the same time, he pointed out several times in his videos that developers must learn to work with this solution. He also want to help them in the coming months by improving the development environment and libraries. However, he himself estimates that a budding developer on Cardano will need several months to understand the issue and be able to create useful DApps.

So is it right to break a stick over Cardano before September 12? Probably not. It is necessary to wait until the specific projects that will arise on it and how they will work.

In addition to ETH, Cardano has the most active developers

According to a report by Blockchain Developement Trends published these days on a study of work on the 50 largest blockchains, Cardano between July 2020 and June 2021 the most active developers ever. On average, they made up to 701 commits per month on GitHub, an increase of 21% over their activity a year ago.

The developers came in second ETH with an average of 447 commits per month, while the third IOTA reached an average of 394 commits. He followed Filecoin (368) a blockchain Flow focused on NFT with 305 commits.

As for the number of developers themselves, they had more active ones ETH (168 per month). Cardano was 165 lagging developers, followed by blockchain developers Avalanche, Ocean, Terra and Cosmos.

As for the year-on-year declines in development activity, the pace of work on cryptocurrencies in particular decreased extremely EOS, BTC Cash a Tron, which was clearly reflected in their price, as these cryptocurrencies were among the most valuable on the market in previous years, but in recent months they have been ahead of newer and more active projects.