- The company behind the development of Cardano, Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), has launched the public tesnet for the Shelley mainnet yesterday, June 9.
- IOHK has invited all users and members of the community to be part of the testnet.
Cardano has reached a new milestone. As announced a few hours ago, IOHK has successfully launched the public testnet for the Shelley mainnet. With the announcement IOHK has invited all stake pool operators to be part of the move towards Shelley. IOHK published the following:
Today marks the start of our public Shelley testnet, a hugely important milestone on our shared journey to Shelley mainnet. From right now, any operator who wants to run a Cardano pool can start getting ready for mainnet staking & delegation later this summer.
In announcing the launch, Tim Harrison, director of marketing and communications for IOHK, said that participants in the private test network, “Friend and Family” will be supporting new users and groups joining the public testnet, as the new testnet brings some changes compared to the ITN.
In line with this, Harrison, in a publication on the Cardano Forum, also invited the stake pool operators of the Incentivized testnet (ITN) to participate. Harrison also emphasized that the configuration will be different compared to the ITN and will have different requirements. But as Harrison also noted, there will be “a steep learning curve”. The Director of Marketing and Communication of IOHK also informed the users and owners of ADA that they have to wait for the next release:
If you are an ADA holder reading this, and you don’t wish to set up a pool, you don’t need to do anything right now. You’ll have the chance to get involved when we release our first testnet wallet, later this month.
The hard fork that will officially launch Shelley is scheduled for July 29, 2020. During the course of this year, IOHK has already released some components required for the upgrade, and has thus reached a number of important milestones. In April, the Byron reboot was introduced, as well as the Daedalus Wallet updated and improved.
Increased hype about Cardano before Shelley’s launch
On the other hand, the announcement of the launch of Shelley’s mainnet has positively impacted the price of ADA. At the time of publication, ADA is trading at $0.08 with a 3.74% loss in the last 24 hours. However, in the monthly chart, the cryptocurrency is one of the biggest winner on the market and is recording a gain of 72%.
The rise in ADA’s price is an immediate effect triggered by the hype surrounding the introduction of Shelley. Data from LunarCrush has also revealed that Cardano has increased its presence on social networks. Between June 2 and 9, more than 10 million posts about the cryptocurrency were posted on social networks.
At the same time, Google Trends shows that search queries on Cardano have increased. In the last 90 days, the term “Cardano” has increased significantly, especially at the end of May, as can be seen in the chart below. Although interest in Cardano has declined within the last weeks, it is still well above the level recorded over the last year.
