Charles Hoskinson provides Cardano Shelley testnet update

Charles Hoskinson, founder and CEO of blockchain engineering firm IOHK, has reaffirmed that fresh updates will be pushed to Cardano’s Shelley testnet on a regular basis following a difficult start.

The incentivised testnet, which marks the start of Cardano’s decentralisation phase, faced some difficulties during its initial launch – which Hoskinson has described as a “learning experience”.

In a live update to the Cardano community, Hoskinson admitted that the initial launch of the Shelley testnet was “a bit rocky”.

However, he also shared how the team responsible for delivering the first iteration of the testnet had been working tirelessly for “four months straight”, and explained that after stabilising the initial testnet, the team members had taken a well-needed vacation.

As a result, known issues and bugs in the testnet were not addressed until after the festive season had ended.

Taking to Twitter, Hoskinson wrote:

Hoskinson also discussed how the IOHK team was now exploring ways of onboarding new enterprise users to the blockchain in an attempt to compete with other chains such as Ethereum.

Hoskinson shared:

“We must have competitive offerings within the Cardano ecosystem for those who wish to issue assets, and a compelling reason why our ledger is a better ledger to issue tokens. We’ve had numerous discussions with those who have ERC-20 tokens, and we have some very good ideas to make Cardano uniquely competitive.”

Also on the agenda is bringing oracle providers and data providers to the Cardano blockchain, with Hoskinson referencing the success of Chainlink and the need for an oracle standard for Cardano.

Testnet issues

Many users reported issues with the Shelley incentivised testnet, including lengthy blockchain syncing times, poor incentives for smaller pool operators, and pool operators who were cheating the system for profit.

However, during his latest video, Hoskinson was quick to point out that the entire purpose of an incentivised testnet was to catch bugs and misuse of the protocol ahead of a full live launch, and such events were to be expected.

The Cardano blockchain is currently undergoing a full third-party security audit, which will provide an updated and publicly available review of the blockchain’s code.

Hoskinson concluded by sharing that the last upgrades to Shelley were imminent ahead of the launch of the fully decentralised mainnet.