Cardano 1.5 has just been released, which kicks off the Shelley development era. The development team said in a post that, for the Shelly era, they are taking a step back to rebuild the system by fixing some architectural limitations present in the Byron code. In doing so, the team said they now have formal mathematical specifications of the validation rules which will be presented at the IOHK summit in April. The transition between Byron and Shelley, however, must be done cautiously. It’s more than just changing the ‘rules of the code;’ it’s a complete migration from one code base to another. As a result, Shelley migration will involve two hard forks. For Daedalus users, the team reassured them that the update will be “very much like any [other].” The first hard fork will deploy an update which will set the rules of the new Shelley era in an “unactivated state” which will be “activated” several weeks later. Exchanges will have to update to Shelley manually.

A Transitional Period

The Shelley era is, in short, a transitional period. During this time, the team also plans to run a testnet for delegation and staking. The testnet will run under the Shelley code rules, updating over time, until this framework is fully adopted. Issues will be resolved as they come. The big news is that, once the Shelley rules are fully implemented, a new code base will the go live on the mainnet. A hard fork will follow and Cardano will officially be on its own mainnet. How soon do you expect Cardano’s mainnet to come out? Are you happy with the progress so far? Let us know your comments below!