• The Shelley hard fork for the Cardano mainnet was finally confirmed a few hours ago, approving Friday’s update proposal.
• The activation of the Shelley mainnet will take place on July 29, 2020, at 21:44:51 UTC.

Already last Friday IOHK activated the launch process for the Shelley hard fork. Nevertheless, the development company behind Cardano had left a back door open to cancel the process and postpone the activation of Shelley until 21:45 UTC today. However, as Charles Hoskinson announced a few hours ago, this will not happen.

IOHK completed the final tests over the weekend and endorsed the hard fork a few hours ago. The current Cardano Byron mainnet will become the Cardano Shelley mainnet on Wednesday, July 29, 2020, at 21:44:51 UTC, beginning with epoch 208:

Stress tests done. All systems go. Update endorsement signed. Rocket is in the air. Hardfork coming July 29th. Will post logs tomorrow.

With V1.18.0, the final version of the node was approved, which Shelley will use to start into mainnet. Furthermore, the final hard fork-ready versions of Cardano GraphQL, Cardano REST and Cardano DB-Sync were released yesterday. As for the Daedalus wallet, V1.6.0 STN5 for the Shelley testnet was released a few hours ago.

Connected to the very latest testnet (MC4, Node v 1.18), it will bring significantly enhanced functionality to all users. For example, users can restore their Byron mainnet wallets based on a snapshot taken on July 20th at 12pm UTC. ITN participants can also retrieve and check their balances. However, the final version of Daedalus for the mainnet is not yet completely finished:

This version of Daedalus is very nearly feature-complete, so it is a very close facsimile of what you’ll enjoy on mainnet after the Shelley hardfork. But of course, this is still a test wallet. Alongside the new features, there are a number of known issues for this wallet which will be addressed in the mainnet release. […]

We still have a small amount of work to do on the wallet backend and explorer, as well as continuing to optimize performance across the board. But nothing major now.

As IOHK also states in the blog post, it will continue to work very closely with the exchange partners in the coming days and help them migrate to Shelley. With more than 40 exchanges, this will be a key factor for a successful migration from Byron to Shelley, according to IOHK.

Euphonized by the final confirmation of Shelley’s launch, Charles Hoskinson stated that Cardano will have a huge ecosystem of native tokens and dApps within a year:

This time next year I predict there will be hundreds of assets running on Cardano, thousands of DApps, tons of interesting projects and lots of unique use and utility. 2021 is going to be so much fun watching Cardano grow and evolve. The community is definitely ready to innovate.

Recommended for you:

• Buy Cardano Guide
• Cardano Wallet Tutorial
• Check 24-hour Cardano Price
• More Cardano News
• What is Cardano?