Cardano announces the prospective launch plan for Cardano's Shelley and ADA staking rewards

Earlier today, Charles Hoskinson revealed Cardano’s next mainnet iteration, the long-awaited Shelley, could launch as soon as Jul. 29. Shelley will introduce the project’s proposed Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus layer, enabling users to contribute to the transaction validation process either directly or via delegation, in exchange for staking rewards. The upgrade also marks a notable step forward on the path towards decentralization as the current mainnet operated as a federated network managed primarily by the Cardano Foundation.

The full rollout of Shelley could take a month to reach completion. Cardano plans to release a Shelley mainnet candidate chain around Jun. 23 before releasing the code to mainnet on the Jun. 30 target date. The official hard fork that will activate Shelley’s changes could arrive on Jul. 29, which would give network participants enough time to upgrade their nodes and wallets. According to the roadmap, Cardano will begin paying out staking rewards around Aug. 18.

Source: Twitter

Why it matters:

• Shelley is a significant milestone it Cardano’s roadmap. It moves the network beyond the direct influence of the Cardano Foundation and introduces a new use for ADA tokens in staking. Whether you agree that staking is a viable use case or value-capture mechanism for cryptoassets, there’s a high demand for staking rewards among investors. It’s why exchanges like Coinbase and Binance have built out and continue to expand their staking services for customers.
• While the upgrade is a step forward, Shelley doesn’t quite get Cardano to its end goal. The next stage, dubbed Goguen, will introduce smart contract functionality. Later stages Basho and Voltaire will look to improve scalability and implement on-chain governance, respectively. Until then, staking and token transfers will be the primary use cases for the network. The timeline for these remaining upgrades is uncertain. But the teams behind Cardano maintain that Shelley is the catalyst for what comes next.

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