Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano (ADA), announced on Twitter that the long-awaited upgrade Shelley has now fully launched. In order to make this improvement possible, the Cardano network had to experience a massive upgrade (hard fork) on July 29 that was one of the largest in the history of the network. 

Cardano Launches Shelley

With the Shelley network and implementation, the Cardano ecosystem will become one of the most decentralized in the market. Moreover, users and participants will be able to stake their coins and get rewarded for being part of the Cardano network. 

Users can start using their own staking pools, however, this is something that will definitely be more suited for participants such as companies or large ADA holders. Meanwhile, traditional and retail users can easily delegate their ADA coins to other firms and pools that are rewarding users for the funds they delegate. 

Some exchanges such as Binance are already offering this possibility to the crypto community. At the moment, there is a possibility to earn around 4.63% per year. However, this can certainly change depending on the number of users that are staking on the platform. 

Shelley Preparation

At the end of 2019, the Cardano network launched a testnet network for the Shelley implementation. The team behind Cardano, including Charles Hoskinson, have been working very hard since 2018 trying to bring the most important and relevant change to the Cardano network. 

Hoskinson considers that it may be possible for Cardano to attract a large number of developers that would start releasing their assets and dApps using Cardano as the main network. This would allow for a new ecosystem to grow around it and compete with the Ethereum (ETH), Cardano’s main competitor in the market. 

While Tron (TRX) was considered to be one of the networks that were competing against Ethereum, things changed in recent times and Cardano is now ready to take the lead in the market. 

One interesting thing to mention about the Shelley upgrade is related to how new network upgrades will be implemented to the network. While hard forks are the most common option for networks to move forward with the consensus of the participants, Cardano will be focusing on continuity using Shelley blocks through hard fork combinators. 

At the time of writing this article, Cardano is being traded around $0.14 and it has a market valuation of $3.64 billion.