Alonzo Hardfork Combinator Event Date

Opens August 4th 2021 updating that node 1.4 components are coming together, with the wallet backend, GraphQL, db-sync, and Rosetta APIs in QA.

In the week of August 9th 2021 they will bring in exchange partners beyond the original set with a mid-August update announcing the Alonzo HFC date from a consolidated opinion of exchanges, the Foundation, and Emurgo, with light bugs already fixed by the flying squad including a serialization and CLI issue.

An HFC event triggers 5 days before, so with a possible 48-hour buffer the window is end of August to first week of September, with a rollback fallback date the next epoch if not comfortable.

Node 1.4 will likely launch the HFC event with the testnet hard forking in the week of August 9th 2021, likely August 31st to September 7th, since exchanges like Binance, Bittrex, and Coinbase talk to Cardano via db-sync, Rosetta, and GraphQL.

Smart contracts run on the node now, and the mental model is that the PAB is like Solidity plus Zeppelin and web3 while the node is like the EVM, so you deploy the infrastructure layer first then keep adding tooling, and multiple languages like Scala could compile to Plutus Core.

The official date comes at the mid-month update as a consolidated opinion so external infrastructure is not caught unprepared and go dark, and that Mary to Alonzo is far easier than the dramatic Byron to Shelley upgrade, handled with exchanges by Mel McCann.

The HFC event will be before the Wyoming conference with a live HFC party where he will open a 30-year-old whiskey his CTO Ramon gave him, and talk to Lars about deploying things to Alonzo as a celebration.

The upgrade is batteries-included for running compiled Plutus code on mainnet, but tooling continues as the Alonzo testnets go from light purple to dark purple to red to black.

PAB full integration is tentatively September 10th but does not impede the hard fork, since once it occurs it is like having the EVM where you can run smart contracts, though no one wants to handwrite bytecode.

Thanks stake pool operators and Plutus Pioneers after six years of thought and four in market, saying the extended UTXO model's verification magic will get a beautiful utility story at the September Cardano Summit.

Alonzo is the beginning not the end, with Shelley doing one more HFC roll-up in 2021 for parameter and Plutus tuning, plus Ouroboros Genesis and the full peer-to-peer stack with the governor by October.

Everything was built from scratch making Cardano the first totally original cryptocurrency since Bitcoin, unlike Zcash, Litecoin, or even Ethereum which borrowed ideas, since every component from peer-to-peer networking to the stake-pool game theory is original and no one else was crazy enough to write at Haskell scale except Kadena and briefly ICP before it went to Rust.

Optimizations remain like UTXO-HD moving from memory-only to a memory-and-disk hybrid, and Mithril is a high priority with two firms reached out to for a prototype, plus a Hydra demo at the summit.

Critics miss the sheer magnitude of the community with thousands of real developers building and training, plus Catalyst's Fund 5 with a quarter million voters casting twice the prior votes.

Thousands of NFTs already issued with tens of millions in activity, and that a critic who mocked you cannot NFT a tweet without smart contracts was answered by a community member NFT-ing the tweet on Cardano thanks to Mary.

Over a million of Ethiopia's 5 million students were onboarded via Prism with millions more coming for RealFi, and that weekly DeFi hacks are a moral hazard since users lose money while developers get paid upfront.

The conference will cover formal verification of smart contracts for high assurance using 30 years of Haskell functional-programming tools, plus a path to EVM interoperability and mainstream languages preserving certification.

Runtime Verification, a key partner since 2017, formalized the EVM and built the Yella virtual machine and Alpha Frontier program, all coming to Cardano, alongside the soon-to-launch Prism Pioneers program.

Cites dcSpark CEO Nico's Why Cardano blog that Ethereum's account model is silently abandoned for ETH2 since you cannot shard global state, moving closer to the UTXO Bitcoin pioneered and Cardano refined, as seen with Ergo's ErgoScript and HUSD, and that most dapps will be rewritten multi-chain in 24 to 36 months, loyal to users not a blockchain like Windows to Android.

As DeFi upgrades to RealFi with identity, metadata, certification, and governance, apps become blockchain-agnostic needing protocol-correctness assurances and on-chain governance without centralized foundations, where Cardano has a lead.

Critics accept Ethereum taking seven years for a proof-of-stake plan but call Cardano's delays damning, though the puzzling one is denial of existence, watching the Poly Market prediction on smart contracts by October 1st that yes-betters may not get paid despite contracts running.

Cardano is not here for a popularity contest or to win the cult of Satoshi or Ethereum, but to improve the world's financial, voting, and property systems until millions become billions.

Recalls Paul Krugman saying the internet would be no more impactful than the fax machine, predicting critics will suffer the same fate, closing that the game has changed for the hearts and minds of billions.