On the late afternoon of March 1, the Mary update was set off on the Cardano blockchain, adding up the concept of creating custom tokens without the need for smart contracts.
Mary’s hard fork represents another step forward towards the long-awaited Gougen update, which will include support for smart contracts and the ability to develop decentralized apps exclusively based on the Cardano network.
“Congratulations on the beginning of a great multi-active age on the Cardano network,” the developing team announced on Twitter.
Following the Mary update, users are now enabled to develop their own tokens and perform transactions with these tokens directly on the Cardano blockchain. In the meantime, all implicated logic works at the intended basic level and thus smart contracts are not obliged to operate with tokens. A large array of kinds of tokens are being supported, starting from non-fungible tokens (NFT), all the way to the so-called “tokenized securities”. Over 1,400 unique tokens have already been launched on the Cardano blockchain, but many of them were conceived as a test.
“Considering that these tokens don’t need smart contracts, operators will be able to obtain, send and destroy their tokens without any transaction fees,” was announced in the IOHK company blog.
