• After first tests, the Cardano Shelley Friends & Family testnet shows only little need for adjustment. The first blocks and staking rewards have already been created.
• The virtual summit for the launch of Shelley mainnet will have a “special guest”, as Charles Hoskinson happily announced.

After the Friends & Family testnet has been launched on Monday, Charles Hoskinson has given a first update on the progress. In a new video, Cardano‘s founder explained that the stake pool operator operators are currently working through a series of tasks that IOHK is assigning them. Very soon, Hoskinson said, testnet operators will also be setting up stake pool operators and creating blocks. The next two weeks will be crucial.

Hoskinson explained that the stake pool operators will be asked to create weekly videos of the Friends & Family testnet, showing the progress and problems with the tests. This will help to raise their profile in the community, which will benefit stake pool users when they choose their pool. Overall, everything is going very well so far, Hoskinson noted:

Overall statistic looks good. We have seen a lot of encouraging things on the network side, dev-ops infrastructure. We already identified a bunch of little configuration things to improve and usability things to improve so from a QA perspective in has been tremendous successful.

The majority of the QA tasks will already be implemented with the next release of the node. The release is scheduled for May 21st. In this regard, Hoskinson also explained that IOHK is committed to developing Cardano in a two-week “sprint” cycle. Accordingly, the current node of the Friends & Family testnet is based on the May 07 release.

Furthermore, IOHK is currently working intensively on the integration of the Haskell based wallet backend. The integration is running according to plan, so that further information about the progress will be announced in the second half of this month. Part of this work also includes the command line interface, where Hoskinson says there is still some minor work to be done.

Commenting on next week’s tasks for the stake pool operators and the overall progress, the CEO of IOHK said:

The operators have a lot to do. They already have a lot of homework and they are starting to work their way through it. And I would love for next week for those pioneers to make some videos, also remember that pioneers have been instructed to bring on two more people. So we would like to grow from a set of 19 to an additional 38 people.

Next week we’ll have more for you to watch as we launch the Shelley Haskell testnet for the mainnet, for everyone, the global testnet. And finally, we will have a lot more to show with the monthly product update.

As Hoskinson further explained, there is a checklist of tasks for each stake pool operator to complete, such as setting up a pool or creating a block. Cardano StakePool Austria, for example, produced its first block and staking rewards a few hours ago.

Cardano’s launch party for Shelley will have “special guest”

Hoskinson further announced that Shelley’s launch party, Virtual Summit, will have a special guest:

I just saw the contract for the virtual summit today. We are putting a whole agenda together; I think we have 5 or 6 work streams for it. And we actually just managed to secure a very, very, very, very special guest to come to the summit. You guys will never guess, but you used his work before. Actually we all do, we are all building on his foundations. So I am very excited about this special guest. But we are not gonna announce that till we put up the website for the virtual summit.

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