In a recent Youtube video, the Cardano founder and IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson explained how Cardano’s fork Shelly will evolve in a process that he described as “a skeleton of many different phases”.
“Its gonna hit a pretty high degree of decentralization within a month of launching the network”
Shelley is a mainnet hard fork focused on improving delegations and StakePools to reconceive the Cardano’s decentralization scheme. It is conceptualized as a transitional stage before Ouroboros Genesis and is the second stage of the complete roadmap to achieve a fully scalable and smarter blockchain.
At the end of the road, the Cardano team expects everything to be aligned “with [their] boards BFT” ensuring better communication at an infrastructure level, thus improving the user experience.
To provide a “fully decentralized Shelly phase” the project team conducted aggressive testing with formal methods and simulations, without registering any major issues. Hoskinson says this satisfactory result will make it easier to implement all the necessary steps to transition between phases. Also emphasized this would be the most dramatic transition of all.
“We will never again go from a federated to a decentralized system, all future upgrades will be less complicated than this, so will certainly be hard forks in the future, but those hard forks aren’t going to dramatically change the system, as much as this”
Cardano will be completely operated as a dynamic and decentralized consensus algorithm.
Each team from Shelley, Goguen, Basho, and Voltaire has been working in parallel to complete this upgrade, so several specifications are still being written and will be announced when the Shelley project is launched. Every one of these names corresponds to a specific phase in Cardano’s roadmap: Shelley is focused on decentralization, Goguen in the smart contract ability, Basho in the scalability issue and Voltaire in the governance algorithm.
It is also important to note that once this transition happens, most of Cardano’s documentation will be redone and merged into a single and more organized site.
“We’re changing the way the network stack works, we’re changing all the ledger rules, we’re changing the consensus rules, it’s the most significant upgrade from that perspective because we broke it into phases where we have the Byron reboot as a major component”
“It’s been a hell of a ride… it’s been exhausting” Hoskin said. However, despite ADA’s performance, he thanked the community for all the support they have given to Cardano, IOHK and himself during these very bumpy roads.
