Cardano (ADA) has conducted a mainnet hard fork to prepare for the launch of Shelley Mainnet. Cardano hard fork would boost the ADA network by increasing its transactions per second rate. The fork has also resulted in a minor price boost for the network’s native ADA tokens.
Cardano hard fork
The network is currently in a transition phase between the current Byron era and the Shelley era. With the latest Cardano hard fork, the network has shifted from the original consensus protocol ‘Ouroboros Classic,’ to ‘Ouroboros BFT.’ The fork’s completion was announced in a forum post.
The post revealed that while the upgrade has benefits of its own, its main purpose is to assist the network in its transition from the Byron to the Shelley Mainnet. The network is moving from Ouroboros Classic, which powered the Byron Mainnet, towards Ouroboros Praos that is to power the Shelley Mainnet. In this transition, the current Ouroboros BFT acts as an intermediate stage of the network’s evolution.
OBFT is a simple Byzantine fault consensus algorithm. A Byzantine fault is a condition of a distributed network in which individual components can fail and the consensus would continue to operate. The condition stores imperfect information about components’ status and it is unclear whether the component has failed.
The upgrade is to ensure that the network transitions smoothly from the Byron to the Shelley Mainnet without any inconvenience to the users.
The team had initially planned to launch the Shelley Mainnet by the end of 2019. However, various setbacks in its development caused the project to delay and only a testnet was launched in December 2019.
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