To the huge excitement of both Cardano’s developer team and the Cardano community, the Shelley network has successfully initiated its highly anticipated hardfork process.
Following a sentimental update shared by Cardano’s creator Charles Hoskinson on Twitter, the Cardano network is well on its way to the scheduled hardfork from Byron to Shelly on July 29th.
The updated proposal will run for five days during which the team will have multiple chances to abort the update, up until Monday. During the weekend, Cardano engineers and the QA team will be conducting a 72-hour session to exhaustively test the performance of the update against their pre-launch checklist.
“Should nothing come up, the update will be endorsed, and the fork will occur without delay or disruption on the 29th.” Every indication we have is the sky is blue, the weather’s good and we are now counting down towards launch.”
According to the official announcement on the same, the update has been designed to run like a voting system in order to accommodate the “future on-chain governance approach of Voltaire.”
Things Should Get Easier With Decentralization
Charles Hoskinson also said that this update will probably be the last of Cardano’s “gigantic disruptive updates.” The next phase will usher in an era of more subtle implements like native assets, smart contracts overlay protocols, and new capabilities.
The first function of the update will be to implement a fundamental change to Byron’s codebase and migrate it to Shelley, which will in turn initiate the hardfork combinatory to deploy the Shelley hardfork.
The second step will involve the endorsement of the first step as well as minor amendments to the initial proposal, after which the green light for the hardfork will initiate. The Cardano team is confident of the progress so far but as they exclusively stated, they are not afraid to delay or abort the process in case they run into a major roadblock.
“If we do hit any issues over the weekend that we feel we need more time to address (e.g. critical integration bugs that may destabilize the network) we won’t be afraid to pause the ‘launch sequence’, regroup, fix and redeploy in the next epoch”
Cardano Will Fulfil the 2009 Bitcoin Promise
Hoskinson added that this particular update will mark a significant milestone In Cardano’s long road to achieve its 2015 dream of global economic access through complete decentralization.
“Cardano began in 2015, as a dream. We wanted to build something that could deliver the promises that bitcoin had back in 2009, not as an experiment but as a system that could evolve over time to meet the needs of billions of people and provide an economic power to those billions of people.”
The successful implementation of the update will see Cardano move from a “static federated system” to a self-evolving decentralized operation that will allow more people to take part in the governance of Cardano come August.
In the past week, Cardano has been working on final updates, performance improvements, and integration, including the MC3 testnet.
“A good number of stake pools have now joined the latest MC3 build testnet. This is looking much like it is the one- i.e. the version (give or take two final tweaks) that will make its way to the mainnet and also be shared with our exchange partners for integration testing.”
