Cardano network had a successful Ouroboros BFT hard fork that takes the network one step closer to its Shelley era.
“The Ouroboros BFT update went through successfully, a really positive next step in the development of the Cardano platform. Thanks to the hard work of all of those involved at IOHK, and we are looking forward to the exciting months ahead,” wrote IOHK, the research and development company behind Cardano.
For more than 18 months, the company has been building a new architectural foundation for the Shelley era. As the network moves towards the Shelley era, Ouroboros Byzantine Fault Tolerance (OBFT) update has been a “really important” step.
This hard fork basically acts as a bridge between the currently in use Ouroboros Classic, to Ouroboros Genesis which will power the Shelley era.
A Stepping Stone
Before the scheduled official hard fork on Feb. 20, the company successfully tested Ouroboros BFT on the Byron testnet.
A consensus protocol, Ouroboros is “the algorithm that sits behind Cardano’s capability as a decentralized proof-of-stake platform.” It is a “stepping stone in compatibility (…) to enable the evolution of Cardano on the Byron era, with its federated blockchain, to the decentralized Shelley era.”
The team is now preparing for “exciting” next few months that will see the network evolving.
Shelley Incentivized Testnet Development Update
In another news, Project Manager Dimitris Poulopoulos talked about the Shelley Incentivised Testnet progress.
The network stability remains the team’s main focus for another week after releasing a Node version 0.8.11 to include further amendments aimed to address the bootstrapping issues to improve the experience for the ADA holder and stake pool operators both.
Also, this week’s Jormungandr release further provided improvements in the bootstrap and network stability. The updates included increased flexibility on the bootstrapping process and requirement for trusted peers to not be empty.
The team is further working on improving network blacklisting from the config file, enclave avoiding duplicated leaders, and spikes of TCP connections before getting stuck.
Apart from updating Poldercast to 0.11.3, Chain-libs has also been updated along with the fragment subsystem now being lockless and more efficient this week.
For next week, the IOHK team is planning to release a new version of Daedalus (2.2.0-ITN1) with pending delegation features, new transaction filtering and fixes for the previous release issues.
