The Cardano neighborhood is marking 6 years because the historic Shelley improve that introduced staking to the community.
Shelley is the successor to the Byron period, during which the Cardano mainnet was launched in September 2017 together with the $ADA cryptocurrency. The Shelley period comprised the essential preliminary steps in Cardano’s journey to optimize decentralization.
The Cardano neighborhood X account shared this milestone in a latest submit, highlighting key statistics that outline the community and the options launched by the Shelley improve.
“Byron laborious forked into Shelley. Stake swimming pools, decentralised block manufacturing and staking rewards turned a factor. The chain hasn’t stopped since,” the Cardano neighborhood X account wrote.
6 years in the past in the present day:
439 epochs
9.25M blocks
190M slotsByron laborious 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 Group (@Cardano) July 29, 2026
Cardano began as a federated community with just some 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 growth theme launched a decentralized ledger, which created a brand new financial system.
In Q1 2021, the stake pool operator (SPO) neighborhood started producing 100% of latest blocks. At present, there are 2,882 swimming pools with 21.56 billion $ADA in reside stake, based on 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 via 5 phases named after chapters of Musashi’s Ebook of 5 Rings: Earth, Water, Hearth, Wind, and Void, shifting from primary protocol validation via adversarial testing to ultimate mainnet preparation.
Enter Output targets an preliminary 5 to twenty occasions improve in Cardano’s base layer throughput capability via Ouroboros Leios, with a mainnet laborious fork deliberate for later in 2026.
The Van Rossem laborious fork, which went reside this July, lays the inspiration for the Dijkstra period laborious fork, which can introduce Ouroboros Leios to Cardano.
