Cardano (ADA) that now is placed on the tenth position in the list of the most popular cryptocurrencies had just announced the completion of a new upgrade known as “Shelley” which is a very important project’s roadmap goal.
The upgrade is said to help Cardano that at the moment can boast a market cap of $2.162 billion become one step closer to its goal of full decentralization.
Moreover, the Shelley upgrade has a direct relation to the stability, interoperability, and governance of the network.
What Shelley Will Bring
The main idea of the Shelley era is to get over the federated epoch and to pass the control of the ledger to the community via stake pools.
Now after this significant update, Cardano will offer incentives to those members of the network who take part in the Proof of Stake consensus protocol.
As not all participants want to permanently run an active node for a long period of time, Cardano provides ADA holders with freedom of choice. If they wish they are able to delegate their stake to a staking pool.
If ADA holders choose this variant, their right to protocol participation will be transferred to the stake pool operator. An on-chain delegation certificate will be considered to be evidence of this fact.
Nevertheless, even in this case, the original holder will still have full monetary rights over the funds that were delegated. It means that there are no any restrictions of using and spending all their funds from their ADA wallet balance. Even if they entrust their holdings to a stake pool operator, they are still free to spend them if they want to.
But even this is not the end of all the benefits that Cardano provides its members with. Delegators will still receive their awards that will be calculated proportionally to their staked amount. The awards will be defined each time when the staking pool validates a new block. Nevertheless, in this case, a fee to the pool operators is to be paid.
Significance of Shelley
In general, it’s worth mentioning that Shelley is a real milestone not only for Cardano but for a wider industry as well. It represents itself the gradual shift away from centralization to a system in which community governance is the major key to the successful operation of the project.
What’s more, for the first time in the industry’s history, Shelley offers participants, even non-technical ones, to act as a collective.
Phillip Kant, developer at IOHK, the company behind Shelley, commented the new update the following way:
“The goal of the Cardano Shelley era is to bring full decentralization to Cardano, moving beyond the federated epoch and handing control of the ledger over to the community via stake pools.”
The Cardano team has always been known for their scientific robustness and timely completion of roadmap goals. This time as well, their Shelley update has been translated into reality just in time. The details of the update are being discussed these days in the framework of the IOHK summit (Miami, Florida, 17 – 18 April).
Though this goal is achieved, it doesn’t mean that the team has no tasks to work on. Now it’s time to work on a new phase of development – the Cardano 2020 vision. And taking into account all the previous goals, we can make a conclusion that the following stage of the project’s development should be very exciting.
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