Binance Vows to Support Cardano’s Upcoming Hard Fork
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Binance Announces Support for Cardano’s Imminent Hard Fork
World’s largest crypto exchange Binance said on September 9 that it will support Cardano’s forthcoming network upgrade and hard fork. The Alonzo hard fork is expected to commence on September 12, at 21:44 UTC.
According to a press statement, Binance will suspend all deposits and withdrawals of Cardano’s native token ADA 30 minutes before the event. Trading of the asset, however, will not be affected during this process. The exchange asked investors to “leave sufficient time for deposits to be processed prior to the above cut-off time.”
Touted as Cardano’s most crucial update, the Alonzo hard fork will introduce smart contracts on the PoS network. This functionality will allow developers to build decentralized finance (DeFi) applications, which let individuals lend or borrow funds from others, trade cryptocurrencies and stake their holdings in exchange for passive income.
Unlike centralized finance services, DeFi platforms don’t rely on intermediaries such as brokerages or banks to offer financial instruments. Instead, they use smart contracts -- programs on the blockchain that execute automatically when certain conditions are met.
As reported earlier, Cardano deployed its smart contract capabilities on the Alonzo Testnet on September 1. The event triggered a rally in ADA’s price and pushed it to an all-time high of $3. At the time of writing, Cardano is changing hands at $2.52, with its monthly gains sitting at over 40%.
Cardano Confronting Significant Scalability Issue in Smart Contracts
Despite the anticipation around smart contracts, Cardano developers have been catching flak for “concurrency” issues with the Alonzo upgrade.
The protocol has shown difficulties with handling multiple users at the same time, which are being blamed on “unspent transaction outputs,” also known as UTXOs. Miniswap, the first DApp on Cardano’s public testnet, was forced to shut down operations due to this persisting error.
Following this development, many critics alleged that Cardano is simply unfit for the current DeFi landscape. Ethereum proponent Anthony Sassano pointed out:
Fortunately for the network, Sundaeswap, another decentralized exchange, reported that it had found a workaround for the issue. In a recent blog post, the company claimed that Cardano could process “hundreds of transactions per block” and rumors about concurrency issues were “greatly exaggerated.”