200 smart contracts launch on Cardano ... but there's a catch

More than 200 smart contracts have been listed on the Cardano blockchain explorer following the Alonzo upgrade on September 13 — but there’s a catch. 

As of now, the smart contracts are in a timelock and cannot be used by developers until they’re released.

Smart contracts have been a long-anticipated feature on Cardano since its launch in 2017 and the functionality was finally enabled with the recent Alonzo hard fork.

Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano and IOHK, said on September 17 that the DeFi space is “up for grabs,” now that Cardano supports smart contracts

Hoskinson said that the winners of what he called the "second wave" of DeFi were going to have liquidity and interoperability, the ability to move multi-chain and cost predictability. “We need governance, we need certification, we need insurance, we need regulation on these things, metadata identity… at the same time, you need to decentralize,” he said, adding:

"The way we constructed Cardano was for that second wave."

Several notable projects have smart contracts in  timelock or are planning on launching soon.

$GREED, a rewards token redistributing $ADA back to holders, Liqwid, an open source and non-custodial liquidity protocol for interest rate curves, SingularityNET, a platform that lets anyone create, share and monetize AI services at scale, and Cardax, the first DEX on Cardano.

Related: Sell the news? ADA price drops 10% following Cardano’s long-awaited smart contracts rollout

Cardano is Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) backwards-compatible and is hoping to attract DeFi developers who wish to save money on transaction fees.

The Cardano price saw a huge 170% price run up since mid July but it's currently about 20% down from its all time high of $3.09 at the start of the month. ADA is currently trading around $2.42.