• Following the announcement of the rollout plan, IOHK has reported on the development progress of Cardano’s Shelley.
• The Cardano (ADA) price has been flying high over the past month, reflecting the high expectations for Shelley’s launch.

As CNF reported, last week, after a long wait, the time had finally come: Charles Hoskinson, CEO of Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK) and inventor of Cardano, announced the launch date for Shelley. According to the published rollout plan, the Shelley hard fork will take place on July 29, 2020, and the first staking rewards at the Shelley mainnet will be available from August 18.

Apart from the great announcement, there have been some other advances last week, which IOHK has now informed about in a new article. On Tuesday the second wave of pioneers for the Friends & Family test network was welcomed, which means that 58 stake pools are now active in the network. IOHK has also created a new faucet to replace the previously manual process of distributing the test (“fake”) ADA. For the time being, the faucet is limited by an API key, but will be available to all testers with the start of the public testnet on June 9th.

Cardano Node 1.12.0 was already re-released on May 28th. The update contains further improvements for Byron on the mainnet, but is also important for Shelley and the testnet, as it includes the integration of most Shelley functions within the node and the corresponding support in the command line tool, which have already been released and are being tested on the Cardano Shelley testnet.

In addition, the Combinator hard fork, which is scheduled to take place on June 23, was run through a first round of testing, with IOHK being “very satisfied” with the results. For the coming week, the focus will be on quality assurance for the Combinator hard fork, wallet integration and the tests by the db-sync team, which form the basis for third-party wallets and the blockchain explorer. IOHK continued on this topic:

Next week, we are wrapping up with exercises and major use cases for stake pool operators. With further updates to the CLI, we are going to test out different protocol parameters. We’re close now to wallet integration with QA activities up next.

The primary focus for the QA team now is to improve the CLI experience. Compared to last week’s ‘big bang’ releases, we are now focusing on a large number of incremental improvements that will provide reliability and improve performance.

Cardano price is extremely bullish

Probably as a result of the announcements about Shelley, Cardano (ADA) is currently one of the best performing cryptocurrencies on the market. The ADA price has increased by around 13% in the past 24 hours alone. On the weekly chart, ADA’s price has risen by around 42%, and on the monthly chart by as much as 63%. Cardano (ADA) thus outshines all other cryptocurrencies within the top 20 by market capitalization, as did Bitcoin, which “only” recorded a price increase of around 11% in the last 30 days.

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