Cardano has launched the Shelley Mainnet

Cardano (ADA), a decentralized public blockchain and cryptocurrency platform with more advanced features than any protocol yet developed and the first to evolve out of a scientific philosophy has officially migrated from the mainnet to the Shelley mainnet via a hard fork. The team stated that no interruptions to the Blockchain’s normal operations are expected, elaborating that “this is the moment when Shelley ‘comes alive’ on mainnet, introducing features such as stake pools, delegation, and rewards, opening up a new era of decentralization for Cardano.”

After almost five full years of development, Cardano has finally transitioned from the Byron to the Shelley era. IOHK, the company behind the ambitious blockchain project, has activated the Shelley hard fork today at 21:44:51 UTC, marking the beginning of an exciting new period for Cardano.

Users are now able to cold stake ADA directly from their Ledger hardware wallets, while support for Trezor will be available in the following weeks. Users can expect to earn around 5 percent APY on their staked ADA.

A continuation of the Romantic Era

The transition from Byron to Shelley is the most significant upgrade to Cardano since its inception, bringing about a new type of architecture and an entirely new set of functionalities.

The two great romantic poets for which Cardano’s mainnet iterations are named, Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, enjoyed a complicated relationship. Historically speaking, Byron outlived his rival by two years. In the Cardano universe, Shelley and Byron barely shake hands before never meeting again.

Cardano Staking Is Live

Cardano upgrade offers two types of staking. Advanced users can run their own staking pools, which requires technical management and reliable uptime. Meanwhile, typical users can delegate their ADA tokens to those pools and earn rewards with minimal effort.

Cardano’s website estimates that users will earn 4.63% interest per year, but this rate may change depending on participation. Users who stake between July 29 and August 3 will receive the first payouts on August 18. Rewards are calculated cyclically, as shown below

Users can now begin to register stake pools on-chain and make them visible to delegators—as many pools that rolled over from the ITN have already been running on the Shelley test net, the process should take no more than a few hours to configure.

Key Takeaways

• Cardano’s Shelley mainnet went live on July 29 at 21:44 UTC
• This upgrade introduces staking, which allows users to invest their ADA cryptocurrency and earn interest
• With staking complete, Cardano must now introduce governance features, custom tokens, and applications

Note: Cardano is the first blockchain platform to be built through peer-reviewed research, to be secure enough to protect the data of billions, scalable enough to accommodate global systems, and robust enough to support foundational change.

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