Cardano Mainnet Went Live Today, Here’s What You Can Expect

The Cardano mainnet went live today after five years of development as it was much-anticipated so let’s see what we can expect in the Cardano ADA news today.

The weekend saw a frenzy of activity from the development team at IOHK that were busy performing last-minute checks and tests to ensure a smooth transition from the Byron chain:

 “The current Cardano Byron mainnet will become the Cardano Shelley mainnet on Wednesday 29th July 2020 at 21:44:51 UTC, starting at epoch 208.”

Tomorrow https://t.co/wPEbM3yTSx

— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) July 29, 2020

According to their blog post, posted on Monday, the final versions of the critical software components are complete but minor tasks related to the wallet still need quite a lot of fishing:

” We’ve released the final hardfork-ready versions of cardano-graphql, cardano-rest and cardano-db-sync. We still have a small amount of work to do on the wallet backend and explorer, as well as continuing to optimize performance across the board. But nothing major now.”

The Cardano mainnet was on track with the launch at the scheduled time and the founder Charles Hoskinson gave an update on the workflow situation as to what to expect today:

 “All the tests look good, everything is green, everything finished today. So we are 100% ready. Daedalus is going to get a red screen and say “hey you need to upgrade.” You guys need to upgrade, so if you go to daedaluswallet.io, or I think the upgrade may be distributed automatically to the software. I can’t remember.”

In the meantime, Trezor and Ledger wallet users will have to wait until the respective manufacturers released the firmware updates as Hoskinson expected both companies to release the updates until next week at the latest. What’s more, the updated firmware will make the devices compatible with Yoroi wallets and Daedalus as well as cold staking features:

 “You’ll be able to use your Ledger and Tezor device with Daedalus and Yoroi. Congratulations on that. You’ll also be able to do cold staking with the Ledger right off the bat. With Tezor, you’re going to have to wait until the next firmware update that’s going to occur in September.”

In terms of the crypto exchanges, the upcoming days and weeks will see them update the software to be compatible with Shelley. Some exchanges that listed Cardano in the early days will face delays due to the need to solve the remnants of legacy software:

 “the older exchanges like Bittrex and Huobi who’ve been listed for a long time, there’s a lot of [inaudible], so fragmentation and some legacy stuff in the software that’s going to need some cleaning.”