IOHK recently went live with its planned Mary hardfork, a milestone upgrade to the Cardano blockchain. Through Mary, the network will now handle ‘non-native’ tokens, natively, creating a multi-asset environment on the blockchain.
According to a release shared with AMBCrypto, this solution was designed to allow any token to be represented on Cardano without the need for smart contracts or custom code.
These assets from other blockchains can behave in a similar way to ADA, Cardano’s native currency. This would allow businesses and developers to take advantage of Cardano’s speed, security, and reduced transaction costs. However, as proposed earlier, ADA will remain Cardano’s principal currency.
Product Director at IOHK, Aparna Jue, believed that native tokens are crucial in the rollout of smart contracts on Cardano. Over the next few months, IOHK team expects to see a “range of promising use cases for the utility of Cardano come to life” and added:
It’s not just native tokens this week, along with rapid expansion of Cardano’s funding mechanism, Project Catalyst, Cardano is now 88% decentralized, bringing us one step closer to not only having the world’s most advanced blockchain, but one whose future development is decided by its community.
With regard to the hard fork overall, during a preview session, founder of IOHK, Charles Hoskinson, said the transition to the Mary upgrade “should be fairly simple.” He revealed that IOHK has been testing the upgrade for almost a month and that the test “looks good, exchanges are happy.”
Amid the positive developments, ADA increased in market capitalization to over $39 million. It currently ranks as the third-largest crypto by market cap, overtaking that of Binance’s BNB token. ADA, which has hiked by 2,595% in the past year, ws trading at $1.24, at press time.