Cardano’s Charles Hopkinson announced a few hours ago that the weekend update implementation was successful and the team is ready to proceed with planned Shelley hardfork and mainnet deployment on July 29th.
The official update announcement by IOHK said stated:
“The current Cardano Byron mainnet will become the Cardano Shelly mainnet on Wednesday 29th July 2020 at 21.44; 51 UTC starting at epoch 208.”
The update also said that the testnet already has 300 stake pools on standby and will feature a new test version of official Cardano wallet Daedalus, for everyone to sample.
“This version of Daedalus is very nearly feature-complete, so it is a very close facsimile of what you’ll enjoy on mainnet after the Shelley hardfork.”
The news has been excitedly received by the Cardano community, with some expecting the launch together with Ethereum’s upcoming launch in August to boost the altcoins market even further.
“$ADA has confirmed breakout of a “double Bottom Formations” which signals the End of the #Altcoin Bear market and a complete reversal of the bearish trend. This is where we start to see Real #Altseason. This was just the appetizer. “
Setting the Bar A Little Too High?
The happiness was however short-lived when Charles Hopkinson later expressed his “extra high hopes” for Cardano’s Shelley and how much the project will have grown by the same time next year.
“This time next year I predict there will be hundreds of assets running on Cardano, thousands of DApps, tons of interesting projects and lots of unique and utility. 2021 is going to be so much fun watching Cardano grow and evolve. The community is definitely ready to innovate.”
The remarks didn’t sit well with some pundits, who think Hoskinson was being way too unrealistic. Crypto analyst and investor Alex Saunders replied with what he probably considered positive criticism.
“I’ll take the other side of that bet. There is no way you’ll have 1000s of dApss in 1 year. There’s not even that many devs familiar with your system. I do think you can get there in 5. Sorry @IOHK_Charles let’s keep it realistic.”
The overall sentiment is that it doesn’t matter how many DApps Cardano can accumulate if their use cases will be weak or non-existent. However, Larry Cermak, Director at The Block, notably went as far as claiming this to be a pump and dump scheme.
Meanwhile, ADA which reached a high of $0.15 yesterday is down 4% at $0.13 with its 24-hour volume dropping from over 743 million to $616 million.
