DISCORD-Where Metaverse interacts with social media

Discord, a social media platform founded in 2015 that has grown in popularity in recent months as normies (many of whom have become more digitally engaged as a result of the pandemic) have begun to participate in the Metaverse regularly, including through virtual gaming, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and other previously niche experiences.

Discord allows users to create invite-only topic-based spaces known as servers, which include text and voice channels and cool features such as the ability to create custom emojis. Text channels on Discord function similarly to Slack in that users can organize conversations into topical discussion threads and even send and receive files. Its voice channels allow users to communicate, video chat, share screens, Livestream (including to a specific audience), and listen to music together via a Spotify plugin. There has even been talking of using the service to obtain virtual currency and goods. Discord has a lot of say over who can stay on its platform, reserving the right to suspend or remove accounts that violate its terms. Moderation is the key and all these features have been done through bots

Prospects:

Brands are taking notice and action as a result of its newfound popularity. While paid advertising on Discord is currently non-existent, and analytics tools are limited, advertisers have discovered amazing ways to engage organically with consumers using the platform. For example, celebrities, companies, and businessmen are using Discord to host fan parties, launch new menu items, hold collectible giveaways, have its mascot chat directly with consumers, and even Livestream concerts.

Despite Cardano's ‘smart contract' upgrade, ADA falls during the cryptocurrency selloff

 Despite the blockchain's long-awaited Alonzo upgrade, which enables "smart contract" functionality, Cardano's ADA token, the world's third-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization has dropped 8% in the last 24 hours

 According to Coinmarkercap, the token is recently trading at $2.42.The drop in ADA coincides with a broader selloff in cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin was trading at $44,636, a 2.9 percent decrease over the previous 24 hours. Ether has lost 5.3 percent in the last 24 hours, and is currently trading at $3,238.

The drop in ADA may be due to a “buy the rumor, sell the news” dynamic, but analysts believe the upgrade will boost ADA's price in the long run.

Analysts believe that as decentralized finance, or DeFi, and nonfungible tokens, or NFT, grow rapidly, Cardano's ability to support smart contracts will allow it to compete more effectively with other blockchains such as Ethereum.

·         “We expect to see the first simple smart contract scripts deployed on Cardano within hours of the HFC (hard fork combinator) the event,” Tim Harrison, marketing and communications director at Cardano creator Input Output, wrote in a blog post on Saturday.

·         The Alonzo upgrade will “significantly increase Cardano’s functionality” and “lead to a material increase in its value,” Nick Spanos, co-founder of smart contracts marketplace ZAP Protocol wrote to MarketWatch through email.

·         Founded by Ethereum’s co-founder Charles Hoskinson and launched in 2017, Cardano is a “proof-of-stake,” or POS blockchain, which means a person can mine new tokens or validate block transactions based on the number of coins they hold. Different from bitcoin’s “proof-of-work” system, which requires a lot of computational efforts to add a new block, the POS system claims to be more environment-friendly. Ethereum is in the process of transitioning from “proof-of-work ” to “proof-of-stake.”

Cardano - Alonzo finally in action

With the arrival of Alonzo at 21:47 UTC at epoch 290, smart contracts – pieces of code that execute themselves when predefined conditions are met – can now be created and deployed on the Cardano mainnet.

                       

When it comes to meeting that challenge, smart contracts are the gold ring. Following months of development on the Alonzo testnet, today's hard fork to the Cardano mainnet allows smart contracts to be written in Plutus scripts, "a purpose-built smart contract development language and execution platform using the functional programming language Haskell."

The update is an important part of the Goguen era, which focuses on developing smart contract capabilities. Goguen was created in collaboration with Shelley, the previous era that introduced the proof-of-stake protocol Ouroboros to the network more than a year ago, as part of an effort to strengthen the network's security and decentralization.

The introduction of Cardano's Plutus scripts will also allow for the development of decentralized applications (dapps) in the ecosystem. However, because the protocol is still being developed and matured, it may be sometime before the Cardano ecosystem is completely ready for dapps to fully materialise on the mainnet.

According to Neil Davies, a systems performance analyst at Input Output, the Cardano team will continue to focus on various improvements such as synchronization efforts and compression of transaction script sizes to optimize network throughput. Indeed, he stated during the YouTube watch party preceding the hard fork that this is the first epoch in which the network has exceeded half a million transactions.

Cardano's native cryptocurrency, ADA, is currently trading at around $2.46, down 5.76 percent from today's high of $2.79 at 18:22 UTC. According to CoinDesk data, ADA reached an all-time high of $3.09 on September 2, 2021.

Nonetheless, Cardano observers can expect to see a number of simple smart contracts deployed in the hours following the Alonzo hard fork, with the possibility of additional projects currently in development being rolled out in the coming months.

Could Cardano replace Ethereum?

 This year will be critical in the Cardano-Ethereum race. Cardano intends to launch smart contracts, while Ethereum will transition to a proof-of-stake model. Much is dependent on whether they can both do so without any technical difficulties.

                               

In May, the Cardano (ADA) blockchain launched Alonzo, its smart contracts upgrade, on a testnet basis. Alonzo was supposed to be released in three stages: blue, white, and purple, with each step exposing more people until it was fully incorporated. It is currently nearing the end of the purple phase, which began in August.

This has increased anticipation for all of the functionality that will be available on the network in the near future. The company developed Cardano called Input-Output had announced last that it had deployed the Plutus smart-contract capability on the protocol's testnet as part of Alonzo purple, driving the price of ADA to a new all-time high of more than $3.

The Plutus smart contract platform enables developers to begin developing decentralized applications. It was used to test the network's first decentralized finance application, MinSwap. The network, on the other hand, is continuing with its plans to fully integrate smart contracts on the network, effectively ending the Alonzo purple testnet and moving to the mainnet. This is scheduled to happen in a few hours, on Sunday, September 12.

The hardfork has the potential to be a game-changer for both the network and the entire cryptocurrency market. The excitement has been attributed to a number of factors that have the potential to steer the cryptocurrency industry in a new direction.

With the hardfork, it is anticipated that all types of decentralized applications (DApps) based on smart contracts will be able to be built on Cardano. This means that Cardano's use cases will expand to include Decentralized Finance (Defi) and Decentralized Exchanges (DEX), in addition to the NFTs that are already minted and traded on the platform.

The ability for developers to interact with platforms' CLI interface is expected on launch day. The core development team has revealed that only a subset of the features will be available at launch. However, the public will be able to use Plutus, the framework that enables smart contract deployment on the network, in future updates.

The importance of Ethereum's first-mover advantage cannot be overstated. Even if Cardano's technology eventually proves to be superior, it won't matter if no one uses it. Cardano may be content to play the long game, but its technical roadmap will not be completed until at least 2025. In the rapidly evolving cryptocurrency industry, four years is a long time.

However, Ethereum is currently congested, and transactions are expensive. Because of network congestion, some developers have already abandoned Ethereum. It will be interesting to see how many more people do so before the proof-of-stake upgrade is implemented. Especially since several other market participants already have smart contracts enabled.

The Ethereum 2.0 upgrade has been in the works for some time, and the transition to proof of the stake will be difficult.

This is why market sentiment toward the launch is currently polarized. Proponents agree that Cardano has the potential to dethrone Ethereum as the de facto smart contracts platform, but they disagree on how and when this will happen. Cardano already uses a more energy-efficient proof-of-stake protocol and has a lower transaction cost than Ethereum, so the possibility is strong. Cardano is also intended to be more practical than Ethereum in terms of transaction settlement