Milestone: Cardano Shelley mainnet goes live

After so many years in development, the Cardano Shelley mainnet has been finally launched following a hard fork of the blockchain. Ultimately, the transition from the previous Byron network marks the beginning of a decentralization and staking capabilities on Cardano blockchain.

Cardano Shelley mainnet launched 

On Wednesday, Cardano Foundation announced the protocol would transition from the previous centralized network, Byron, to Shelley. The later is a decentralized network that has been in development for years, and underwent several testnet iterations. The transition to Cardano Shelley mainnet would enable more values on the Cardano protocol.

Most importantly, the launch of Cardano Shelley mainnet begins full decentralization on the Cardano blockchain. According to the report by Cardano Foundation, Cardano is about 50 to 100 times decentralized more than other notable blockchain networks. Consensus and governance on Cardano will be distributed amongst 1,000 staking pools, at least.

Staking begins in Cardano

In this course, the voting right on Cardano is being handed over to the community members. Aside from the now-decentralized era on Cardano, the launching of the Cardano Shelley mainnet also marks the beginning of the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) model on the blockchain, a move proposed in Ethereum 2.0.

Thus, Cardano will now support stake pools and staking rewards. This capability would mean that the holders of ADA, the native digital currency of Cardano, can easily delegate their stake to any pool, which creates passive rewards for the holders in return.

For ADA holders, Cardano Foundation said:

If you use the Daedalus wallet, you will need to update your software version upon release. Likewise, the current version of the Daedalus wallet that is compatible with the Shelley testnet, version 1.1.0-STN1, will be made redundant, and users will have to download a Shelley mainnet enabled wallet—handily color-coded in green to denote its live status.