Cardano launches Shelley mainnet and offers rewards for staking
2 min readCardano has launched its Shelley mainnet and introduced rewards for all users who own its native ADA cryptocurrency. The launch took place on July 29, 2020. From a technical point of view, this event is referred to as the hard fork, which introduced the appropriate changes to the Cardano blockchain code.
Charles Hoskinson, CEO of Cardan, wrote on twitter:
We have reached Orbit
Rewards for staking Cardano are active
Cardano offers two types of staking. Advanced users can run their own staking pools, which requires technical management and uptime. Meanwhile, typical users can delegate their ADA tokens to these pools and earn rewards with minimal effort.
It is stated on Cardano’s website that users receive an interest rate of 4.63% per annum, but this rate may vary depending on participation. Users who roll out between July 29 and August 3 will receive their first payouts on August 18. Rewards are calculated cyclically as described below.
A long way to staking
Cardana’s staking functions have been evolving since 2018. After months of work, this project invited the first participants in December 2019 to stake real value. Gradually, interest in the Shelley testnet increased. And the hype has obviously paid off: since the beginning of July, Cardano has registered 14,000 new addresses every day.
However, hype alone is probably not enough. Some suggest that social network involvement and market trends are not as positive as they seem, which could have a negative impact on ADA prices.
Cardano currently has only a few staking applications, but the project plan suggests that this will change. The “Voltaire” phase will introduce a management system to drive development, and “Goguen” will add smart contracts, applications and custom tokens.
IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson recently said that these upgrades could attract thousands of developers to the Cardano platform. He wrote on twitter:
Cardano will no doubt need to pursue this goal in order to compete with Ethereum, which has more than 3,000 dApps, more than 200,000 tokens and its own upcoming rewards for staking.
Are you already staking ADA? What do you think of the development of Cardano, can it ever compete with Ethereum?
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