By Tobi Loba
The CEO of IOHK, who doubles as the co-founder of Cardano (ADA) and Ethereum (ETH), Charles Hoskinson, took his time to explain how the launch of the Shelley era of Cardano (ADA) will play out, in a video on YouTube.
In this video, he went deeply into the 2 years of hard work and the million lines of code that will launch the staking era of blockchain.
Charles Hoskinson said the launch of Shelley will be in phases. The first phase starts with a closed-off testnet that will be expanded to all users, while the second is a hybrid phase to enable users to upgrade from the Byron code.
As soon as all users upgrade successfully, the mainnet will be launched, which will result in the creation of a fully and truly decentralized staking network.
Shelley, the Result of Two Years of Hard Work
In the video, Charles Hoskinson noted that launching Shelley has been more complicated than a hard fork or launch of a crypto project, due to the nature of the Cardano blockchain.
As the blockchain is transformed from a static federated to a dynamic decentralized model, it’s necessary for Shelley to create a resolute foundation for the launch of other eras of Cardano (ADA).
The CEO of IOHK said diligent work has been ongoing on Cardano over the past five years, but work started intensively on Shelley in 2017. He said it’s now 2 years of figuring how Byron will move to Shelley, to realize the full decentralization of Cardano blockchain.
Realization of Shelley
For Shelley to finally come to existence, there is need for a deep research, which made IOHK, the company behind the development of Cardano (ADA), to decide the best way to know how it will perform in the market. This brought about the idea of Shelley Incentivized Testnet (ITN).
In the course of realizing the participation of people in the network, necessary data will be gathered to determine the realization of Shelley.
The success of the ITN and the concrete understanding of the Byron era will precede the vital steps needed for the final transitioning into Shelley.
The first step is to onboard all the participants of ITN to the Byron reboot, containing all the necessary bridge code needed to start the process of transitioning to Shelley, most importantly, the Ouroboros Byzantine Fault Tolerance protocol (OBFT). The OBFT, a staking protocol for the Cardano blockchain, will precede the Shelley upgrade phase, and end in a Shelley hybrid phase.
In the video, Charles Hoskinson said that the Byron OBFT will possibly be launched by next week for main Daedalus clients and will run in parallel with Shelley Haskell testnet.
The upgrade phase will ensure that all of the core consensus nodes are successfully replaced with the Shelley clients.
According to Charles Hoskinson, the upgraded window will be allowed to run for weeks to speed up the process. To get Byron completely shut down, there has to be a hard fork that will prevent the creation of more Byron blocks.
The process of shutting down Byron will result in Shelley hybrid phase, with two different ways of making blocks. One for registered stake pools, and the other for IOHK, Emurgo, and the Cardano Foundation.
Implementations in Eras after Shelley’s Launch will be Easier
After the full launch of Shelley, all the Cardano (ADA) succeeding eras will be easier to implement. In a further explanation, Charles Hoskinson said that the Goguen upgrade will only require a simple upgrade to the ledger rules.
Hoskinson further stated that future upgrades will also be easier because all the upcoming eras, such as Goguen, Basho, and Voltaire are already developing alongside Shelley. He thereby promised to keep the Cardano community abreast of all upcoming developments about these eras.