With the activation of smart contracts on mainnet only a few days away, developers are executing trades on the Cardano testnet to check whether everything is working properly.
One such developer is Alessandro Konrad, who’s the co-founder of the SpaceBudz NFT project, the creator of the Nami Wallet and also the operator of the stake pool Berry [BERRY].
A couple of months back, Alessandro was also interviewed by none other than Charles Hoskinson, to speak about the successful launch of SpaceBudz:
What are SpaceBudz?
We wrote a piece back in March when they had just launched. In a few words, they are a collection of 10 thousand NFTs with different characteristics and rarities. At launch, the prices ranged from 10 to 100 ADA, whereas at the time of writing this article, the floor (the minimum price at which they are sold) ranges between 3500 and 4000 ADA on the most popular NFT trading platform: CNFT.IO. Some of the rare ones are selling for over 50k ADA.
This trend is somewhat reminiscent of the CryptoPunks when they first launched and which are now being traded at unimaginable prices on the Ethereum blockchain.
Trustless trades using smart contracts
Since smart contracts aren’t active on mainnet yet, NFTs on Cardano are currently being traded via escrow services. This means that if someone wants to buy a SpaceBud, they need to use a trading platform like the above-mentioned CNFT.IO.
However, that involves having to trust the centralized platform, as they execute the trade on behalf of the users, receiving the NFT and the ADA and then sending them back to the respective users.
With the implementation of smart contracts, these trades will become trustless and instant, allowing to also implement bidding, auctions and many more functionalities.
The SpaceBudz project has recently executed its first smart contract trade on the Cardano testnet:
First successful smart contract trade on the testnet!
A buyer accepted an offer of 100 tADA for tSpaceBud2 and both parties received their share:https://t.co/SpMM0A9Sqk
The bidding side is the next thing we gonna test, which has a little bit more complex logic.@Cardano— SpaceBudz (@spacebudzNFT) September 8, 2021
First DEX on the Cardano testnet
Another project which has recently deployed its dApp (Decentralized Application) on the Cardano testnet has been Minswap. However, they ended testing a few days later due to something called the concurrency issue:
You may be seeing an error message that says "UTxOs are being used this block" a lot. That's the concurrency issue. We're working on that.
— Minswap | FISO live! 🚀 (@MinswapDEX) September 3, 2021
The broader crypto community used this event as attack fire against Cardano and its UTxO model, with many influencers spreading FUD (Fear Uncertainty Doubt). In response, Charles Hoskinson had this to say:
As expected, there is a massive FUD storm underway. We saw the same with Shelley last year. It's nothing new. Just people wanting to burn down what they don't understand or feel threatened by. September 12th is a big day, but just a day on a long journey we are all on together.
— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) September 7, 2021
