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- The internal Cardano Shelley beta testnet was started on April 25th with the creation of the genesis block.
- The testnet is one of the last steps before the hybrid phase for the transition of the Shelley mainnet is publicly launched.
Cardano has come a big step closer to the launch of the Shelley mainnet. Charles Hoskinson, the inventor of Cardano and CEO of Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), wrote in a tweet published yesterday that “a wizard has arrived in the land of Cardano when he means to” and shared a screenshot of Duncan Coutts, head of IOHK’s technical team.
According to this, Cardano has already mined the first Shelley block on April 25th at 23:27:38 UTC. As Coutts writes, the process worked right away after he got the command line installation running.
Meanwhile in Cardano land, a Wizard arrives precisely when he means to! pic.twitter.com/rNVOtWlNaz
— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) April 27, 2020
In response to a Twitter user’s request, Hoskinson clarified that the block was not yet the first block of the hybrid phase of the transition to Shelley, but rather part of an internal testnet:
Not quite yet, friends and family infrastructure slowly turning on. But we are getting much closer to the hybrid phase.
Launch of the Shelley mainnet in phases
As CNF recently reported, the launch of the Cardano Shelley mainnet will take place in several phases. In the first stage there will be an internal test phase, which, as has now been announced, started last Saturday 25 April. This will be followed by a “hybrid phase” which will allow users to make the transition from the current Byron phase to Shelley.
As Shelley introduces a new address type, BECH32, all wallet users will need to migrate to the new Shelley wallet. After the hybrid phase there will be a hard fork, so the protocol will no longer care about Byron and will work solely according to the Shelley rules. From this point on it will also be possible to redeem ITN rewards, participate in staking and delegate.
Until now, ADA holders have only been able to stake and delegate their ADA and receive rewards within the Shelley Incentivized Testnet (ITN). Before the launch of the Shelley ITN, a snapshot was taken which limited the number of possible participants as no new users were allowed. This will change with the Shelley mainnet.
A major step towards the launch of the Shelley Mainnet was recently also taken with the launch of the first version (V1.0.0) of the Cardano Daedalus wallet. The wallet is also developed by IOHK and offers all the functionality needed for staking and delegating ADA.
