Cardano's Goguen Rollout Could Directly Compete with Ethereum with its New Smart Contract Implementation

Cardano’s Goguen era, which marks the next period after Shelley, will be the era of implementing smart contracts and enabling decentralized applications (Dapps) on the network. The Goguen era is Cardano’s third development phase, which is expected to start in the third quarter of 2020 with the release of its testnet. 

Cardano recently became the 6th largest cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization. 

Cardano’s second development phase, Shelley, is expected to go through a hard fork on July 29. At the Cardano Virtual Summit: Shelley Edition, Cardano’s product manager Nebojsa Vojvodic introduced the key elements of Goguen, the next chapter in Cardano’s development. 

The Goguen era will be focusing on building a versatile global social and financial operating system where users could build solutions around application domains including for areas such as supply chain, track and trace medical records, identity, voting, managing census, property registration. This would also include a lot of applications between peer to peer systems and traditional finance payments systems. 

Goguen is primarily a service platform, and Vojvodic emphasized the focus on user experience and the utility of building a user-friendly application. He added that it was a challenge to create a system that can be seamlessly integrated into existing applications, especially those off-chain. 

Aimed at developers, the Goguen platform caters to the cohort with the foundation and tools they need to build applications on Cardano. According to Vojvodic, mobile, web, desktop application developers, blockchain protocol developers, embedded developers, fintech developers, and smart contract developers will be able to use Goguen and this will help with the exploration of building alternative environments on the Network and grow the developer community. 

Ethereum killer: Goguen to make Cardano a multi-asset ledger

When Goguen launches, Cardano will become a multi-asset ledger that allows users to define, forge, and transfer their custom tokens on the network. The Goguen update will also bring applications including Plutus and Marlowe contracts. 

The Goguen update will not prioritize ADA transactions and contracts over other tokens issued on Cardano, unlike Ethereum; where the blockchain prioritizes ETH over other ERC-20 tokens on the network. Developers would be able to use Cardano at ease, as tokens on the network will inherit all security and smart contract behaviors of Cardano’s native crypto, ADA. 

Charles Hoskinson, the founder, and CEO of IOHK, said in his YouTube video that to demonstrate Cardano’s unique multi-asset standard, he will issue Kanye Coin, and the circulation will be 1 token for each vote that Kanye gets in the upcoming US presidential election.

What’s next after Shelley and Goguen?

Source: Cardano Roadmap

Part of Cardano’s goal is to become a fully decentralized system. IOHK has been working hard to push out the Goguen phase, which is then followed by two other phases, Basho and Voltaire. The Basho phase will be based on improving scaling issues, and Voltaire will be based around governance.