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ADA Cardano Community Celebrates Sixth Anniversary of Shelley Upgrade: Pledge and Decentralization Milestones
The Cardano Community is commemorating the Sixth Anniversary of Shelley Upgrade. This important turning point has made pledges on the Cardano blockchain possible and pushed the network in a more decentralized direction.
Shelley upgrade brings pledge and decentralization
Shelley follows the Byron era. The Byron era marked the launch of the Cardano main network in September 2017, along with the launch of the ADA cryptocurrency. Byron laid the infrastructure, and Shelley achieved Cardano's first major advance in optimizing decentralization.
To highlight this achievement, Cardano's official Community X account pointed out multiple milestones brought by Shelley, including the launch of decentralized block production, the launch of pledge rewards, and the continuous uninterrupted operation of blockchain since the upgrade. The community said in a recent post that Cardano "has entered the Shelley era with a hard fork. Pledge pools, decentralized block production and pledge rewards have become a reality. Since then, the chain has never stopped running."
According to the Cardano Community X account, Shelley introduced pledge pools, decentralized block production and pledge rewards for Cardano, and the network has remained continuously operating since the upgrade.
Initially, Cardano ran as a federated network, with only a few nodes running the protocol. Byron restart in early 2020 set the direction for decentralization by adopting a modular node design, paving the way for future scalability and upgrades.
The Shelley era began in July 2020, bringing pledge pools and delegation functions. These changes introduced a decentralized ledger structure and established a new economic incentive system through ADA pledges.
Pledge pools and the evolving ecosystem
By the first quarter of 2021, Cardano's community of pledge pool operators will begin producing all new blocks on the network, marking a complete shift to community-driven block production. According to Cexplorer data, there are currently 2,882 active pledge pools, jointly managing 21.56 billion ADA current pledges.
Period| Amount of pledge pool| Current ADA Pledges
July 2020 (Shelley launched)| about 100| Unreported
First quarter of 2021| Approximately 2,000| Rapid growth
July 2024| 2,882 |21.56 billion ADA
Major upgrade outlook: Ouroboros Leios and Van Rossem hard fork
Six years after the Shelley upgrade, Cardano is currently preparing for its most significant expansion plan: the Ouroboros Leios upgrade. The protocol development is being tested on a public network called Musashi Dojo.
Ouroboros Leios, named after the new consensus agreement, is divided into five consecutive stages, each stage inspired by the chapters in The Book of Five Wheels: Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, and Air. These stages guide the protocol to complete technical verification, performance testing, adversarial evaluation, and ultimately prepare for launch on the main network.
The goal of Input Output Global, the technology company that is driving Cardano's research and development, is to have Ouroboros Leios increase the throughput of Cardano's base layer by five to twenty times. Activate the upgraded main-network hard fork is planned to take place in the second half of 2026.
Last July, the Van Rossem hard fork was launched, establishing the framework for the upcoming hard fork in the Dijkstra era. Dijkstra fork will be responsible for integrating Ouroboros Leios into the Cardano main network.
Dictionary of Words: Ouroboros Leios is an upcoming upgrade to the Cardano consensus protocol that aims to significantly improve transaction throughput and network scalability, using phased deployment on the public test network and subsequent adoption on the main network.
