Shelley Haskell rollout - weekly update w/e 29 May

This week was a big week for announcements, when we laid out our Shelley rollout plan during our monthly Cardano LIVE show. If you didn’t see it, and still want to know “Wen Shelley?!” you can catch the replay here.

Meanwhile, we’ve had a busy few days on the testnet. Things are going great.

On Tuesday, we were delighted to bring our second wave of pioneers on board, as nominated by our original settlers! After kicking things off in a Hangout, our new cohort has been making themselves comfortable and getting set up. Our new pioneers will be getting a survey today so we can see how they are feeling after a few days on the trail! Alongside Telegram chat, we’ve created a dedicated forum section for new pioneers and old hand mentors to chat and share experiences as they work through the onboarding exercises and tutorials.

We’re delighted to see we already have 58 pioneer stake pools running on the Friends & Family testnet. Next week, our pioneers will continue to work through a few more exercises as they continue to test our early network, so expect that number to grow.

We’ve just created a faucet to replace our manual process of distributed test (or ‘fake’) ada; this is limited by an API key for now, but as we get closer to the public testnet, we’ll open this up to all. As we announced during our Thursday show, we are currently targeting 9th June for the public testnet for more stake pool operators to join.

Development progress

On the development side, we’ve also had a good week. We released the Cardano Node 1.12.0 update. This was deployed on the Cardano mainnet and released on May 28, 2020. The update provides further improvements to Cardano Byron on the mainnet. However, it is also important for Shelley and the testnet, since it includes the integration of the majority of the Shelley features within the node and corresponding support in the command line tool that are pre-released and being tested on the Cardano Shelley Testnet.

Thanks to the efforts of our original pioneers, we have made a lot of improvements for the second wave. The Daedalus wallet and Adrestia teams are integrating the Shelley node. The hardfork combinator has gone through its first round testing and we are very pleased with the results.

Next week, we are wrapping up with exercises and major use cases for stake pool operators. With further updates to the CLI, we are going to test out different protocol parameters. We’re close now to wallet integration with QA activities up next.

QA focus

We have continued to make good progress on the testing side, with all our pioneers providing excellent testing support. Our second wave of pioneers are already providing valuable fresh feedback. This is mostly in the form of feature requests; very few bugs are currently being raised which gives us further validation of the rigorous development path we have taken to get here. The network is still operating under a high intensity set up in order to speed up the testing process and discovery of the potential bugs. We are not quite trying to ‘break’ things, but we are running it hard!

The primary focus for the QA team now is to improve the CLI experience. Compared to last week’s ‘big bang’ releases, we are now focusing on a large number of incremental improvements that will provide reliability and improve performance.

Looking ahead

Next week, QA will focus on the hardfork combinator and wallet integration. Also, parts of db-sync will be ready for the team to test out the basic building blocks that provide the foundations for high quality wallets, 3rd party integration and block chain explorer. We are also going to test out the process for ITN rewards retrieval.

We’re just under three weeks into the Shelley Haskell rollout, our Friends & Family testnet phase. Thanks as ever to all our pioneers - and indeed everyone in the Cardano stake pool community already getting actively involved. We’ll be sure to keep you all posted, every step of the way - and keep an eye out next week for another video from delivery lead, Christopher Greenwood. Till next time!

11 Likes

Great job guys. At last the waiting is over. The time had come for ADA to shine like a star.

Amazing progress so far team. I’ve been setting up some testnet nodes recently and have been learning alot about jormungandr from documentation.
I got some full time experience as a system admin and I would really love to get involved with the Shelley rollout, could anyone give me a headstart ? At what point could one join right now ?

Best.
oprtr