Cardano’s Biggest Turning Point? Shelley Turns 6 Today

The Cardano community is marking 6 years since the historic Shelley upgrade that brought staking to the network.

Shelley is the successor to the Byron era, in which the Cardano mainnet was launched in September 2017 along with the $ADA cryptocurrency. The Shelley era comprised the critical initial steps in Cardano’s journey to optimize decentralization.

The Cardano community X account shared this milestone in a recent post, highlighting key statistics that define the network and the features introduced by the Shelley upgrade.

“Byron hard forked into Shelley. Stake pools, decentralised block production and staking rewards became a thing. The chain hasn’t stopped since,” the Cardano community X account wrote.

Cardano started as a federated network with just a few nodes. Early 2020 saw the Byron reboot pave the way for decentralization, with a new node implementation built from scratch within a modular design to support future upgrades.

The Shelley upgrade in July 2020 then introduced stake pools and delegation. The Shelley development theme introduced a decentralized ledger, which created a new economic system.

In Q1 2021, the stake pool operator (SPO) community began producing 100% of new blocks. Currently, there are 2,882 pools with 21.56 billion $ADA in live stake, according to data from Cexplorer.

Cardano eyes biggest scaling upgrade

Fast forward six years, and Cardano is eyeing its biggest scaling upgrade: Ouroboros Leios, which has launched on a public testnet named the Musashi Dojo.

Ouroboros Leios runs through five phases named after chapters of Musashi’s Book of Five Rings: Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, and Void, moving from basic protocol validation through adversarial testing to final mainnet preparation.

Input Output targets an initial five to twenty times increase in Cardano’s base layer throughput capacity through Ouroboros Leios, with a mainnet hard fork planned for later in 2026.

The Van Rossem hard fork, which went live this July, lays the foundation for the Dijkstra era hard fork, which will introduce Ouroboros Leios to Cardano.