Cardano Celebrates Six Years of Shelley and Teases Biggest Upgrade Yet

The Cardano community is celebrating a major milestone - six years since the historic Shelley upgrade. This marked the beginning of staking on the network and paved the way for decentralization.

The Shelley era was a critical step in optimizing decentralization, introducing stake pools and delegation. Today, there are 2,882 stake pool operators (SPO) with 21.56 billion ADA in live stake, according to data from Cexplorer.

As Cardano looks towards its biggest scaling upgrade, Ouroboros Leios has launched on a public testnet named the Musashi Dojo. This upgrade aims for an initial five to twenty times increase in base layer throughput capacity through Ouroboros Leios, with a mainnet hard fork planned for later in 2026.