To support the transition of Cardano from the Byron era (federated blockchain) to the Shelley era (decentralized blockchain), IOHK engineers have implemented Ouroboros BFT to provide a simple way to migrate from the Ouroboros Classic protocol of the Byron era to the Ouroboros Genesis protocol of the Shelley era. Ouroboros BFT was added in Cardano SL 3.0.0 (of Cardano 1.5.0), tested in staging, updated in Cardano SL 3.0.2 (of Cardano 1.5.2) and had some maintenance updates in Cardano SL 3.0.3 (of Cardano 1.6.0).
After successful testing of the OBFT hard fork in staging, the IOHK DevOps team is planning to test the OBFT hard fork on the Byron testnet on December 16, 2019. They will switch the Cardano testnet blockchain from the original consensus algorithm, Ouroboros Classic (of the Byron Era), to Ouroboros BFT via a protocol update.
Anyone who would like to test and experiment with the updated Byron testnet after December 16, 2019 should be on Cardano 3.0.3 (or higher).
