Cardano’s Shelley hard fork, five years in the making, goes live

After five years of development, Cardano’s next upgrade is finally here. 

The network implemented its latest hardforkhardfork, Shelley, today. This upgrades the network from its prior iteration, Byron. Shelley’s introduces stake pools and delegations. 

Staking on Shelley involves holding large amounts of its native currency, ADAADA. The benefit to doing so is that there’s a greater chance you could earn yet more ADA in rewards for validating the network. All of this is powered by its Ouroboros protocol, which chooses who gets to add the next block to the Cardano blockchainblockchain. 

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You can also operate something called a stake pool, which lets you stake other users’ coins on their behalf or delegate their coins so that someone else can stake them. IOHK said in a press release that it expects to reach around 1,000 stake pools; this is based on the number of stake pools opened during its testnet. Upon launch, 444 stake pools are operational on Cardano. 

The first block for Shelley was validated on a testnet version of the new chain on April 27. A testnet is like a beta version of a blockchain. Usually, testnet blockchains don’t involve real money. But IOHK ran an incentivized testnet for Shelley, meaning that its users were playing for keeps.

Cardano releases code for its much-anticipated Shelley upgrade

The Cardano blockchain is set to enter a transformative new era over the coming weeks. Its transition from “Byron,” a static, federated blockchain, to “Shelley,” the dynamic, decentralized version, is due to kick off today, with the release of the Shelley code. (There’s a backup date, 7 July—in case things go pear-shaped.) “Shelley will finally show us whether Cardano's technology has what it takes to become a truly decentralized and scalable global crypto asset,” Juan Villaverde, who leads the...

Now it’s moved onto mainnet, onward: “It’s a monumental achievement, but this doesn’t mean we’ll be standing still, and we’re looking forward to the delivery of the Voltaire and Goguen phases of the Cardano roadmap, which will see robust governance arrangements and smart contracts functionality put in place this year,” said Aparna Jue, IOHK’s product director, in a statement. 

Charles Hoskinson, the CEO of IOHK, added: “This time next year we could see hundreds of assets and decentralized applications running on Cardano.”