Full show notes at https://cardanode.com.au/ep019

Cardano is Moves Closer Towards Smart Contracts
With Alonzo White, the second stage of the smart contracts roll out for Cardano being successfully forked on Testnet, we are seeing more and more users being onboarded in a controlled and steady-state, with currently 100 people executing smart contracts on Testnet. This number should double by the time the Alonzo White phase is complete and the teams move on to the Alonzo Purple phase. This slow and steady approach ensures that there are no configuration issues or scalability issues of the network.

In one of Charles Hoskinson's latest live updates, he mentioned that there are a few things that are needed to get to the Alonzo hard fork event.

Fully operating node, which has occurred and,
a fully integrated wallet backed, which should be finished next week. The Daedalus wallet will be connected and hopefully be ready by September 10th.
Once these two factors are checked, then the final count down to a hard fork can start.

The remaining development required isn't related to the hard fork combinator event of the blockchain but relates to the infrastructure that developers will need to work and run their applications on the blockchain.

The Plutus Application Backend is the infrastructure for the developers to roll out smart contracts and decentralise applications easily.

Charles mentioned that the hard fork event could be late August or early September with a possible date of August 31st as the potential launch date.

Users will be able to run smart contracts at this point but the parallel development of the infrastructure for the Plutus Application Backend will most likely continue after this point to have a better environment for developers to build and deploy applications on. Some developers and teams already have tooling and code ready to deploy.

At the moment more and more developers are coming into the Alonzo environment and testing for bugs, reporting and improving the entire infrastructure. We'll see more iterative improvements along the way as more integration partners come on board.

The rollout for Alonzo is a lot easier and smoother than Shelly rollout.

August is crunch time for the teams working on Alonzo and the rollout of smart contracts. Good luck to the teams.

FUD Ethereum Maxis
Ethereum users defend their investments creating fear and doubt in the Cardano ecosystem.
Etherum is struggling to change to proof of stake will it happen? One day I'm sure.
With issues from lost keys to a stake pool to costs and difficulty of moving to PoS.

More Wallets Are Being Developed
Wallet integrations for dApps including Daedalus are in the works.

Semantic web 3 wallets will also be needed to power a lot of the decentralised finance applications that I've been reviewing over the last month.

Wallets like Nami wallet, which I've done a quick review on and the upcoming release of the new Yoroi wallet will enable users access to these apps to interact with the blockchain.

We also have a review on wallet setups for the upcoming dApp earn of Cardano.

If you want to learn more about some of the new upcoming dApps that are on the blockchain see our previous episodes:

Ep018
Ep017
Ep016
Ep015

US Infrastructure Bill with a Side of Crypto Tax
US congress looks at passing a new infrastructure bill, and also slip in a major crypto tax to raise an extra 30B in tax revenue in the country. Unsure where that number comes from.


Scams
Twitter Scam Bot https://twitter.com/cardanoPhishing

Watch my scam video on YouTube

Novellia Calls It a Day
In a recent post from the Novellia team, they announced that one of their core developers have decided to move on. As a result, they have been trying to meet the shortfall in resources by working more over time but unfortunately, it wasn't sustainable.

As a result, the team have decided to release all they had on open source Github repositories and call it a day.

I wish the team all the best and hopefully will see more from the founders in the future as they start working on other things. If you've delegated to their stake pool you will need to move your delegation to another pool.

Partnerships Galore
Occam + Emourgo
SundaeSwap & Liquid Finance
Meld Security Tools
PlayerMint + Retro Pool Holding a Rocket League Tournament

Pool Round-Up
Since Fed 22nd the pool has gone from 1000 ADA to 10.6M in 5 months. That's doing ok.