Cardano Marks Six Years Since Shelley Upgrade

The Cardano network is marking a significant milestone as it celebrates six years since the Shelley upgrade. This upgrade, which brought staking to the network, marked a critical step in Cardano's journey towards optimizing decentralization. The Shelley era was the successor to the Byron era, during which the Cardano mainnet was launched and the ADA cryptocurrency was introduced.

The Shelley upgrade introduced several key features, including stake pools and delegation, as well as a decentralized ledger that created a new economic system. Since its introduction, the number of stake pools has grown significantly, with 2,882 pools currently in operation, holding over 21.56 billion ADA in live stake.

Cardano is now eyeing its biggest scaling upgrade yet, Ouroboros Leios, which has launched on a public testnet called the Musashi Dojo. This upgrade aims to increase Cardano's base layer throughput capacity by an initial five to twenty times and will be prepared for mainnet with the Dijkstra era hard fork later in 2026.