Even after the recent hard fork “Mary,” Cardano’s development status remains “Work in Progress.” Founder Charles Hoskinson revealed details about the roadmap on his YouTube channel.Cardano is still in the middle of the large-scale Goguen rollout and has thus completed about half of its long development path. With the next hard fork Alonzo, which enables smart contract applications on Cardano, the network conquers the next major milestone on the way to a fully decentralized multi-asset environment. According to Charles Hoskinson, Cardano founder and previously co-founder of Ethereum, the developments are fully on the roadmap schedule. On his YouTube channel, Hoskinson confirmed that the hard fork could take place as early as the end of April.After the Shelley era, Goguen represents the biggest turning point in Cardano network development. With the last Goguen fork Alonzo, Cardano is finally entering the age of smart contracts: users can now set up decentralized applications (dApps) on Cardano. The aim is a user-friendly environment in which “non-programmers” can also create financial smart contracts.To this end, the developers have already uploaded the new version of the node software to Github. The version contains, therefore “significant performance improvements and numerous other minor improvements and functional enhancements.” The updates are intended in particular to reduce the CPU utilization of nodes and stake pools that process a large number of transactions. In addition, the new version would eliminate reward calculation breaks.The version is intended to prepare node operators for the next stage of development. Consequently, “the focus of current development work is on completing and integrating support for the Alonzo era.”In addition cFund, the investment arm behind Cardano, has the first investment announced. A total of 500 million US dollars has flowed to the payment service provider COTI in several financing rounds. FinTech has been working for some time…