The Cardano (ADA) network will perform a scheduled upgrade on Feb. twenty to innovate Ouroboros BFT, an improved consensus machinery. The update is an intermediate step between the current Byron era and Shelley, which will introduce staking on mainnet.

Announced by IOHK on February. 19, the upgrade will be executed on Thursday at 9:44 PM UTC, or 4:44 PM EST. The network will undergo a hard fork, though the squad emphasizes that "it is a planned and managed protocol upgrade."

What is Ouroboros BFT?

The new protocol is a development over the original Ouroboros "Classic," which is currently agile on Cardano'south mainnet. While Ouroboros is a provably secure proof-of-stake consensus protocol, the original version fabricated several compromises in decentralization. Namely, the list of validators is currently fixed and their succession is known alee of time.

Cardano's Shelley era focuses entirely on removing the "training wheels" and letting the community decide on block validators through staking. It will be powered by Ouroboros Praos, which adds several features to make information technology much harder to corrupt validators.

In between the ii major eras, the Cardano team decided to split the transition into 2 difficult forks. The conclusion was taken to ensure that no interruptions to network service occur every bit its validation is delegated to the community.

Shelley timeline

The Cardano squad suffered strong setbacks in its Shelley plans. While it was initially planned to be released before the cease of 2022, the team was but able to launch an incentivized testnet in December.

The testnet was an important step in preparing for Shelley, helping create a staking community in a prophylactic environment. In the meantime, Cardano is also working on every subsequent phase, such equally smart contracts.

Following a delivery to improve timeline estimates, Cardano delivered the hard fork on time. In January, IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson promised a mid-February date for the upgrade.