Will Cardano’s Shelley Be Released on Time?

Cardano (ADA), the innovative blockchain project featuring a scalable cryptocurrency (ADA) that’s poised to support smart contracts and the development of dapps, is getting very close to entering its long-awaited phase of development, Shelley.

Shelley, the next phase in Cardano’s development, is of vital importance to the entire project as it will shift the Cardano blockchain to a fully decentralized network while bringing staking and delegation to the network. The Shelley phase is set to be released by Q1 2019, which gives us until the end of March.

As we are already a week into March, Cardano community members are both excited and nervous that the team at IOHK won’t deliver this release on time.

The development of Cardano has been painfully slow, and ADA supporters and hodlers are running out of patience. Therefore, the team at IOHK are under a lot of pressure to get this importance phase released on time.

Will Shelley Be Released by Q1 2019?

In a recent Reddit thread, a concerned Cardano community member by the name of Dynd voiced their concerns about Cardano launching the Shelley release by the end of Q1 2019.

Their comments were as stated:

“It is now March 6 and there is still no testnet. I am starting to get worried about Shelley being released this month. Am I alone in this? ADA really can’t take yet another delay. I want to believe, but I am really starting to doubt they can pull this off in Q1. There’s just three weeks left. Am I missing something?”

The comment above received a slew of responses from Cardano community members, where the general consensus was that Shelley will not be fully released by the end of March.

Stages of Switching to Shelley

While this may be taken as bad news, a community member by the name of Jonne33 explained that there are many stages to transitioning to Shelley. They stated that Cardano will be moving through these stages as quickly as possible through March and beyond.

Jonne33 admitted they don’t believe Shelley will be fully released by the end of Q1 2019, but believes the Shelley testnet will be live in March, and a series of steps towards the full release will follow.

According to the Reddit user, the steps of everything switching over to Shelley are as follows:

1. Initial testnet will be compiled from members of the StakePool Taskforce.
2. Once testnet is complete – introduction into switching.
3. Daedalus Wallet Updates including:
   • Wallet backend is beginning to be decoupled.
   • Network switches to OBFT, which is a step required to transition between Byron and Shelley.
   • Network is switched to Shelley, but still under 100% control of the core cluster.

In regards to decentralizing the Cardano network through the staking process, Jonne33 said:

Staking Process:

• Starting from the second epoch of Shelley – some % of slots will be given out to registered pools.
• Third epoch – If previous stake pools successfully create their blocks then more slots will be allocated to other stakes pools.
• This process will be continued until complete handover to a decentralized network.
• You will be able to stake your ADA from both Daedalus and Yoroi.

Jonne33 also gave their opinion on some dates they believe important stages will be rolled out. They estimated the Cardano network to shift to OBFT by mid-March, the Shelley testnet to be introduced in the second half of March, and for Shelley to be implemented on the mainnet in mid-April.

While the stages and timelines mentioned above are simply opinions of a dedicated Cardano community member, they received much-appreciated feedback and was voted as the top comment on the thread.

Do you think Cardano will at least release the Shelley testnet this March? Let us know what you think in the comment section below.