Will Cardano's Alonzo update be its undoing?

Cardano’s Alonzo Hard Fork is supposed to make smart contracts possible. Simply put, users will now be able to mint things like non-fungible tokens (NFTs) using ADA, the Cardano token.

However, this may be easier said than done.

The first ever Cardano decentralised app (DApp) called Miniswap went live on the testnet on September 4. And, some users have reported concurrency issues.

Simply put, they allege that Miniswap can only handle one transaction per block, making it wildly inefficient.

According to Anthony Sassano, an Ethereum enthusiant, the issue is due to the lack of a ‘Cardano Virtual Machine’ – a global state like the ‘Ethereum Virtual Machine’ – that allows smart contracts be executed simultaneously.

“The first dapp went live on Cardano today and ADA fanboys are finally discovering that you can’t peer review your way out of fundamental issues.” Anothony Sassano

Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, hit back saying that creating a decntralised, scalable distributed system is not the easier thing in the world. But just because it’s a work in progress doesn’t mean that it’s useless.

“The problem our industry has is it basically says well if you don’t support my thing or I can’t see a way to make my thing work, what you have constructed is absolutely useless, forever useless, and it’s just a toy. And then they use vanity metrics, not even understanding what they are saying.” Charles Hoskinson

Do you think smart contracts will be Cardano’s undoing or is the centralised cryptocurrency here to stay?