On 27th April, the founder of Cardano and Redditors celebrated the first block of Shelly that was produced earlier on 25th April 2020.
Recently, IOHK announced the release of Daedalus 1.0 an ADA wallet made after 1.5 years of hard work. The team yesterday exclaimed its success when Hoskinson said that it had received an “overwhelming response”.
Just a day later, today the community celebrates Shelly’s first block. The Shelly phase of Cardano starts with users delegating their stakes – the key ingredient to produce new blocks in a Proof-of-Stake protocol.
As Cardano’s plan is to move to a completely decentralized network, Shelly plays as a stepping stone to make history in terms of decentralized financial systems leveraged by blockchain.
Redditor, u/rawriclark posted on r/Cardano, stating how the genesis block of Shelly had been produced.
The same was tweeted by Charles Hoskinson with the comment “Meanwhile in Cardano land, a Wizard arrives precisely when he means to!”.
Right now Shelly is in its Testnet phase and Mainnet is expected to roll out by Q2 of 2020. Usually, incentivization and staking structures are planned for the Mainnet phase of a project, in the case of Cardano the Testnet itself allows ADA holders to participate in the network to earn ADAs through delegating their stake or by operating a stake pool. According to Cardano, this enables them to “test something earlier testnets couldn’t: real behavior – and real behavior requires real rewards”.
Considering the Shelly phase is all about decentralization, the team has made it a point to be as careful and secure as they can be to keep the network from malicious plays.
As of now, large blockchain projects are controlled by less than 10 mining pools, making them vulnerable and exposed to attacks. With an incentive structure designed to achieve an equilibrium of around 1000 pools, Cardano could be 50-100 times more decentralized than the existing blockchain networks by the end of the Shelly era.
Cardano claimed how Shelly can make the network 100% decentralized. Using a blockchain delegation certificate, operators can transfer their participation rights to stakeholder pool operators when they are offline.
The Shelly phase opens doors for a decentralized cryptocurrency ecosystem, much like Bitcoin, but faster in terms of synchronization and more effective client support among other benefits.