The Cardano group is marking 6 years because the historic Shelley improve that introduced staking to the community.
Shelley is the successor to the Byron period, through which the Cardano mainnet was launched in September 2017 together with the $ADA cryptocurrency. The Shelley period comprised the important preliminary steps in Cardano’s journey to optimize decentralization.
The Cardano group X account shared this milestone in a latest publish, highlighting key statistics that outline the community and the options launched by the Shelley improve.
“Byron arduous forked into Shelley. Stake swimming pools, decentralised block manufacturing and staking rewards turned a factor. The chain hasn’t stopped since,” the Cardano group X account wrote.
6 years in the past at the moment:
439 epochs
9.25M blocks
190M slotsByron arduous forked into Shelley. Stake swimming pools, decentralised block manufacturing and staking rewards turned a factor.
The chain hasn’t stopped since. https://t.co/VYnjq2c4pC
— Cardano Neighborhood (@Cardano) July 29, 2026
Cardano began as a federated community with only a few nodes. Early 2020 noticed the Byron reboot pave the best way for decentralization, with a brand new node implementation constructed from scratch inside a modular design to assist future upgrades.
The Shelley improve in July 2020 then launched stake swimming pools and delegation. The Shelley improvement theme launched a decentralized ledger, which created a brand new financial system.
In Q1 2021, the stake pool operator (SPO) group started producing 100% of recent blocks. Presently, there are 2,882 swimming pools with 21.56 billion $ADA in reside stake, in line with knowledge from Cexplorer.
Cardano eyes greatest scaling improve
Quick ahead six years, and Cardano is eyeing its greatest scaling improve: Ouroboros Leios, which has launched on a public testnet named the Musashi Dojo.
Ouroboros Leios runs by means of 5 phases named after chapters of Musashi’s Guide of 5 Rings: Earth, Water, Hearth, Wind, and Void, transferring from primary protocol validation by means of adversarial testing to ultimate mainnet preparation.
Enter Output targets an preliminary 5 to twenty occasions enhance in Cardano’s base layer throughput capability by means of Ouroboros Leios, with a mainnet arduous fork deliberate for later in 2026.
The Van Rossem arduous fork, which went reside this July, lays the inspiration for the Dijkstra period arduous fork, which is able to introduce Ouroboros Leios to Cardano.
