On July 29, Cardano (ADA) will migrate from the Byron to Shelley era with a planned hard fork. The team stated that no interruptions to the Blockchain’s normal operations are expected, elaborating that “this is the moment when Shelley ‘comes alive’ on mainnet, introducing features such as stake pools, delegation and rewards, opening up a new era of decentralization for Cardano.”

Charles Hoskinson: thousands of DApps by 2021

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson is extremely optimistic about the platform’s future, he expects to see thousands of decentralized applications and tons of projects residing on the new mainnet a year from now:

Source: Twitter.

Source: Twitter.

A continuation of the Romantic Era

The transition from Byron to Shelley seems to be going according to plan without any major deviations anticipated. The market seems to approve of the project’s progress as the price of ADA has increased exponentially over the past few months.

Transitioning from Byron to Shelley on Cardano. Source: IOHK.

Transitioning from Byron to Shelley on Cardano. Source: IOHK.

The two great romantic poets for which Cardano’s mainnet iterations are named, Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, enjoyed a complicated relationship. Historically speaking, Byron outlived his rival by two years. In the Cardano universe, Shelley and Byron will barely shake hands before never meeting again, if everything goes according to plan.

The hard fork is happening just two days before Ethereum's (ETH) fifth birthday; another project co-founded by Hoskinson. Historically, there has been a lot of unease between the two projects and their creators.