In an incredible achievement, the number of smart contracts currently live on the Cardano mainnet has surpassed 300,000.
Popular crypto commentator Altcoin Daily shared the development in a tweet. The expansion comes less than four years after Cardano introduced smart contract functionality to its mainnet through the Alonzo hard fork.
That hard fork rolled out the Plutus smart contract language on the Cardano mainnet. Since then, the number of contracts deployed on the mainnet has surpassed 300,000. Fresh data from the Cardano blockchain insight platform Alethea shows that the total number of live smart contracts on the mainnet now stands at 300,490.
Simple Scripts has contributed 163,300 smart contracts, while Plutus V1 and V2 scripts have deployed 7,000 and 124,990 contracts, respectively, on the Cardano mainnet. However, the Plutus V3, which was introduced to the mainnet in August 2024, has added 5,200 smart contracts to the blockchain, according to Alethea data.
New Milestone Signals Increased Developer Activity
For context, smart contracts are self-executing agreements on a blockchain created through lines of code. Based on the nature of smart contracts, they execute actions automatically following the terms of the said agreement without the involvement of an intermediary.
Notably, developers have leveraged the smart contract functionality to create decentralized applications (dApps) interacting with the blockchain. Therefore, crossing the 300,000 milestone signals increased developer activity on the Cardano mainnet.
Steady Smart Contract Growth Since Vasil Hard Fork
Meanwhile, the development arm of the Cardano project has introduced several upgrades to enhance the network’s smart contract functionality over the years.
This was evident following the rollout of the Vasil hard fork in September 2022. The upgrade improved the Plutus smart contract language, making it more efficient and cost-effective for developers to deploy dApps on the mainnet.
Before the launch of Vasil, the number of contracts on the Cardano mainnet was around 63,490, with Plutus V1 Scripts accounting for 2,900 of this sum, as of July 11, 2022.
However, the figure has soared to above 300,000 as of today, marking an increase of 373.28% over three years.
In 2024 alone, nearly 100,000 smart contracts were added to the Cardano network. The Plutus V2 Scripts led the stats, recording an astounding 96,523 contracts from January to December 2024.
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