• There is (almost) nothing standing in the way of Cardano’s Shelley. The launch process was initiated a few hours ago, so hard fork will probably be activated with the next epoch on July 29, 21:45.
  
• However, in case of major problems, the process can still be aborted until Monday, July 27.

The countdown has started, the launch process of Shelley on July 29th is activated. As Charles Hoskinson, the inventor of Cardano, announced in a video update, the IOHK team worked until the last minutes and finally initiated the Shelley hard fork process about 21:45 UTC. Over the weekend IOHK will continue to carry out numerous tests, whereby it is still possible to abort until Monday:

We have now begun the countdown over the next 5 days to hard fork Cardano from Byron to Shelley. Our las chance to abort will be sometime on Monday, during the weekend the engineers and the QA-team will be conducting an exhaustive 72 hours burn in, to go through all checklists that we have.

However, as Hoskinson also pointed out, everything looks like a successful launch at the moment. Via a blog post, Tim Harrison, Director of Marketing and Communications at IOHK, also gave a deeper insight into the work of the last few days and the launch process. As Harrison explained, last week was a “Herculean task”, consisting of the latest updates to the node and ADA wallet software, integration and performance improvements for it.

Yesterday IOHK again launched a new testnet based on a new release candidate (MC3). Numerous stake pools had joined the MC3 build testnet, so, as Harrison stated, it looks like this version is “the one”, plus/minus one or two final tweaks that will find their way into mainnet and be made available to the exchanges for integration testing.

The last steps before the launch before Cardano’s Shelley

The update process has been designed to reflect Voltaire’s future on-chain governance approach. The code update process runs “basically like a voting system”. According to Harrison, the first step is yesterday’s “proposal” to make a change. For it to be implemented, it has to be “approved”. This is the second step.

During this time, we can also make amendments to the initial proposal. So we plan to take full advantage of this period. Over the weekend, Alan and his QA team (plus a bevvy of volunteer testers) will put the mainnet release candidate through its final paces. We will do final stress tests and performance analysis. We do expect some ongoing performance enhancements over time, for example, in the area of CPU usage and optimisation.

If necessary, IOHK will release a new version or abort the launch process. As Harrison also stated, IOHK is not afraid to interrupt the “launch sequence” and postpone it to the next epoch, 5 days later.

The migration protocol supports this until July 27 at 21:41:51 UTC, so by that time the nodes can be rebooted with the new configuration and ready to produce blocks. Accordingly, the third step is a “vote of confidence”, whereupon the hard fork combinator is activated:

The third and final step will see the hard fork combinator triggered and the transformation will take place at the start of the next epoch, on the 29th July at 21:44:51 UTC. Whoosh. Liftoff. And… here’s Shelley!

Regarding the integration of Shelley for crypto exchanges, Harrison stated that the update for the exchange partners is designed to be relatively easy with the new Adrestia interface. A team #ReadyforShelley was set up to focus on supporting the exchanges. A major update on the progress will be released next week on Thursday.

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