Highly Anticipated Cardano Upgrade Receives Major Boost From Binance

Cryptocurrency exchange Binance announces it will support the launch of Cardano’s upcoming smart contract mainnet.

Binance says that when Cardano (ADA) upgrades to its Alonzo hard fork, it will suspend withdrawals of ADA for half an hour or until it deems the network to be stable.

The Alonzo hard fork will introduce smart contract capability to the third-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, opening up decentralized finance (DeFi) and other functionalities to users.

“The ADA network upgrade and hard fork will commence during epoch 290 or at approximately 2021-09-12 21:44 (UTC). Deposits and withdrawals of ADA will be suspended starting from 2021-09-12 21:14 (UTC).”

On the Cardano blockchain, an epoch currently consists of 432,000 slots. Each slot is equivalent to one second, translating to an epoch lasting approximately five days. At the time of writing, Cardano is at epoch 289.

According to Cardano developer Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), some cryptocurrency exchanges have already started integrating against the Alonzo network, including US-based digital asset exchange Coinbase and Hong Kong-based exchange HitBTC.

Hardware wallets Ledger Nano S and Ledger Nano X have been marked as “Alonzo ready” by IOHK.

ADA is trading at approximately $2.5 at the time of writing, according to CoinGecko. It is down nearly 20% from the all-time high of $3.09 it reached earlier this month. Cardano’s percentage share of the total market cap is about 3.98% at the time of writing.

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Featured Image: Shutterstock/GrandeDuc