- The Cardano Shelley mainnet has reached two very significant milestones with the launch of epoch 3.
- On the one hand, the target of 1,000 registered stake pools was reached, and on the other hand the first block was produced by an external party beyond the federated nodes of IOHK and Emurgo.
The Cardano Shelley mainnet entered epoch 3 a few hours ago, and has now reached another important milestone. With epoch 2, which started on August 8th, the first blocks were produced through Input Output Hong Kong and Emurgo; with the start of epoch 3, external stake pools were authorized to validate blocks for the first time.
As Charles Hoskinson, the inventor of Cardano, explained via YouTube, Shelley mainnet has thus taken another significant step. The first block was produced by the stake pool “1percentpool.eu”. Furthermore, within the first seven hours after the start of the epoch 75 different stake pools created one block.
Congratulations to 1 Percent Pool for making the first block: https://t.co/tIyAbz9t0b you're part of history as are all the others who are in this Epoch!
— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) August 13, 2020
With epoch 3, the community-driven stake pools will now validate 10% of all blocks, while the federated nodes will initially create 90% of the blocks. The latter rate will continue to decrease with each epoch as Cardano moves from a federal system to a fully decentralized system.
New Cardano node version 1.18.2 and 1,000 stake pools
During the video, Hoskinson also stated that the node version v.1.18.1 had to be rolled back to v.1.18.0 because of a edge case, a problem or a situation that occurs at an extreme operating parameter. A new, revised version 1.18.2 will be released this Friday, at the beginning of next week at the latest:
Lots of software coming out. We had v.1.18.1. We have decided to roll that back because we discovered an exhausting edge case and with an abundance of caution we gonna go through some more QA and do v.1.18.2 sometime soon and bundle it in with wallet backend and Daedalus improvements as well.
According to Hoskinson, exchanges are also making great strides in integrating Shelley. Most “exchanges are green now, the once that are red are in the final countdown, in the final stretch to get things where they are ready to go,” the IOHK CEO said. The “hardest” case is Bittrex, because they have the oldest wallet and the old code of Cardano.
Otherwise, Hoskinson also mentioned another major milestone: The Cardano mainnet now has over 1,000 registered stake pools. This has come much faster than expected, Hoskinson said:
I think we just crossed the threshold of 1,000 registered stake pools. And these are coming down a lot faster than I expected them. […] It is amazing to see decentralization so quickly. And it gonna be so cool to see actual performance data come and be able to apply these non-myopic stuff that we developed out of Oxford into the system.
