It’s been an epic (epoch?) five days for the Cardano ecosystem! The Shelley hardfork went off without a hitch, and with that, the project has transitioned from a centralized federated network to a decentralized open one where every ADA holder has a stake in the success of the system!
Below are some of the highlights over the first epoch of the Shelley era.
For Cardano:
- The Shelley hard fork occurred at 5:46 EST on July 29!
- Stake pools started registering immediately after the fork
- A new version of Daedalus was released with full Shelley functionality which allows staking to stake pools
- 747 (and counting) stake pools registered on the Cardano blockchain
- Almost 5.17 B ADA staked so far(and counting)
For the Cardano Canucks:
- Registered our pool on the mainnet – we were one of the first 25 pools to appear in Daedalus
- Moved our ADA out of cold storage and funded our pledge address
- Performed security scans on our two AWS accounts and remediated all high and medium priority items
- Developed CloudWatch alerts to monitor underlying virtual machine performance
- Updated our Grafana dashboards for mainnet to monitor our stake pool nodes
The next few epochs will also be exciting! This is what you can expect from the Cardano Community:
- During the month of August, IOHK will be focused on optimizations and fixes as well as some well deserved rest
- Exchanges which have frozen ADA wallets to upgrade infrastructure will start coming back online
- The Yoroi wallet will come back online and support staking soon
- Ledger and Trezor hardware wallets will start supporting delegation
- Expect more stake pools to come online
What are we planning for the next month?
- Continued monitoring and optimization of our stake pool to ensure we achieve maximum uptime and performance
- Marketing planning to ensure we are attracting delegators
- Continued communications with our delegators and community
- Public facing Grafana dashboards for our delegators
Finally, what we are going to see over the next few months is a gradual lowering of the decentralization (‘d’) parameter, which controls the percentage of blocks which are created by pools vs the federated nodes run by IOHK, Emergo and the Cardano Foundation. What this means for stakers is that for the first several epochs, rewards will be lower until the fully decentralized state is reached. You can keep an eye on the status of the d parameter in Daedalus via the Info tab of the staking center.