Cardano’s Shelley Undergoes ‘Dress Rehearsal’; All Set For July Release

The Cardano network seems to be on track as the community anticipates the release of Shelley by the end of this month. IOHK’s Tim Harrison sheds light on the progress of the Shelley rollout. 

Cardano To Release A New Testnet

Altcoins endured an eventful week following significant price surges across the cryptocurrency market. Amongst the top performing altcoins, Cardano [ADA] was a part of the list. The coin witnessed a whopping 23.7 percent growth over the last 7 days. While the coin has been evidently doing well, the network confirmed that the Shelley update is also making progress.

The Cardano network has been working on the network’s transition into the Shelley era from the Byron era. Earlier in June, the network released a roadmap pointing out the tentative dates for the release of the updates part of the Shelley era. More recently, IOHK’s Tim Harrison published a blog post highlighting the updates pertaining to the Shelley rollout.

With the hard fork less than a month away, Harrison revealed that the team was working hard to initiate the hard fork by 29 July 2020.  As per the blog post, the team has dedicated itself to developing a new testnet. The recent addition to the development of Shelley was the hard fork combinator. This update was proven to be a success and the team even ran the entire process “in the field.”

Elaborating on the readiness of the upcoming updates, Harrison wrote,

“So we have effectively recreated the steps that we’ll go through later in July to activate Shelley functionality on the mainnet. A ‘dress rehearsal’, if you like. And so far, it’s looking good.”

The new testnet will be made available to pioneer testers after the team is content with the additional functionality that they hope to present before the pioneers. Unlike the previous testnet, this latest one will focus on balances being captured and displayed correctly. Apart from balances, the transition of the network from Byron to Shelley keeping in mind the traffic would also be explored in the latest testnet. Harrison added,

“So this new testnet is a very close simulation/simulacrum of where we’ll be come end/July and early August, that blend of the ‘old’ Byron-based network and the new Shelley node.”

Apart from the testnet, the team is reportedly releasing a new Daedelus next week that would uphold the compatibility of addresses as well as transactions between the current era and the forthcoming era.

Additionally, the participation of exchanges is very important during the network update of any platform. The network urged the cryptocurrency exchanges to make sure that they were ‘Shelley ready’.

Cardano’s Growing Market Cap

While ADA had been outperforming several other altcoins in terms of price, the coin’s market cap followed suit. Cardano recently overtook other prominent cryptocurrencies like Litecoin [LTC] and Bitcoin SV [BSV] in terms of market cap. Cardano currently stands as the sixth largest coin with a market cap of $3.37 billion.