The Cardano Effect takes high-level developer information and projects happening in the Cardano space and breaks them down into consumable podcast episodes for the community. In Episode 20, they were joined by David Esser, Duncan Coutts, Ravi Patel, Charles Hoskinson and Neville Freeman from IOHK to discuss the upcoming Cardano 1.5 release.
In this episode, you can learn details on the upcoming release, how it’s going to happen and also how this update will affect exchanges:
The upcoming Cardano 1.5 release is in preparation for a huge milestone for the Cardano protocol, which is to move from the Byron codebase into the new, decentralized Shelley environment. This will be done over two hard forks as shown in the diagram below.
(Note: the term ‘hard fork’ has a negative connotation in cryptocurrencies but we use this term as a technical hard fork, without the risk and community drama you may be thinking of. Think of it as a planned protocol upgrade whereby all parties of the current federated system have agreed to the change and there is no ‘split’.)
The changeover will be performed this way so that Byron and Shelley can run in parallel for some time and ensure smooth transition for users. It makes sure the upgrade is done the right way with good principle while also being completed as quickly as possible. Using Ouroboros BFT allows a speed-up in implementation and deployment time to Shelley.
And what is Ouroboros BFT? BFT stands for Byzantine Fault Tolerance which is a specific class of consensus algorithms, and Ouroboros BFT is a minimalistic version from the Ouroboros family that fits into this qualification. It is used as a bridge between Ouroboros Classic, used by Byron, with Ouroboros Genesis, which will be used by Shelley since these two protocols are substantially different. Once Cardano 1.5 is released, it will be very important for all users to perform the upgrade before the BFT hard fork.
Finally, for exchanges: there is a need to upgrade in order to be prepared for all of these coming changes. Firstly, they should get onto the v1 API’s which have been available for some time now. Exchanges should also subscribe to IOHK’s exchange newsletter. Finally, any exchanges facing difficulty or needing assistance can head toIOHK’s ZenDesk (Technical Support Desk) to raise support tickets and get the help they need.
As an additional piece of advice for Cardano users, it has been recommended that you take any funds off of exchanges if you don’t already have them in a secure wallet. If the exchange you use does not complete the necessary upgrades by the hard fork, there will be restrictions on performance and ada withdrawals.
Watch the full episode here:
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