After five years of development, Cardano will launch the Shelley mainnet today at 21:45 UTC.
The weekend saw a frenzy of activity from developers, IOHK, who were busy performing last-minute checks and tests to ensure a smooth transition from the Byron chain.
“The current Cardano Byron mainnet will become the Cardano Shelley mainnet on Wednesday 29th July 2020 at 21:44:51 UTC, starting at epoch 208.”
According to their blog post, which they posted on Monday, the final versions of critical software components are complete. However, minor tasks related to the wallet and explorer still needed finishing.
” We’ve released the final hardfork-ready versions of cardano-graphql, cardano-rest and cardano-db-sync. We still have a small amount of work to do on the wallet backend and explorer, as well as continuing to optimize performance across the board. But nothing major now.”
With that, the Shelley mainnet release looks to be on track for launch at the scheduled time.
Here’s What Cardano Investors Should Expect
This morning, Cardano founder, Charles Hoskinson gave an update on the workflow situation, as well as what to expect today.
“All the tests look good, everything is green, everything finished today. So we are 100% ready.”
Tomorrow https://t.co/wPEbM3yTSx
— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) July 29, 2020
Hoskinson mentioned that the Shelley upgrade would require Daedalus users to update to the latest Daedalus mainnet wallet.
“Daedalus is going to get a red screen and say “hey you need to upgrade.” You guys need to upgrade, so if you go to daedaluswallet.io, or I think the upgrade may be distributed automatically to the software. I can’t remember.”
Source: daedaluswallet.io
However, Ledger and Tezor hardware wallet users will have to wait until the respective manufacturers release firmware updates. Hoskinson expects both firms to release the updates by next week at the latest.
What’s more, the updated firmware will make the devices compatible with Daedalus and Yoroi wallets, as well as add cold staking features.
“You’ll be able to use your Ledger and Tezor device with Daedalus and Yoroi. Congratulations on that. You’ll also be able to do cold staking with the Ledger right off the bat. With Tezor, you’re going to have to wait until the next firmware update that’s going to occur in September.”
In terms of the crypto exchanges, the coming days and weeks will see them update their software to be fully Shelley compatible.
Exchanges who listed Cardano earliest will face delays due to the need to untangle the remnants of legacy software.
“the older exchanges like Bittrex and Huobi who’ve been listed for a long time, there’s a lot of [inaudible], so fragmentation and some legacy stuff in the software that’s going to need some cleaning.”
The Shelley mainnet represents the culmination of years of development by the Cardano team. While the project has taken criticism over missed roadmap deadlines, today should mark a joyous occasion for investors who kept their belief.
The event will be live-streamed on the Cardano Effect, with Charles Hoskinson joining the hosts.