Cardano’s Charles Hoskinson reveals tentative date for OBFT hard fork

As the Cardano ecosystem anticipates the transfer of Shelley testnet to mainnet, a major step towards it is the OBFT hard fork. In his latest livestream session, CEO of IOHK Charles Hoskinson revealed that the OBFT hard fork should happen on 20 February.

He said,

“The OBFT hard fork, tentatively, tentatively, tentatively, I said three times, looks like the date is going to be Feb 20. We were originally thinking it to be on the 14th but we wanted a few extra days for certain partners. So we suspect that February 20th is when we’re going to do the hard fork.”

The Byron phase uses Ouroboros Classic, while Ouroboros BFT [Ouroboros Byzantine Fault Tolerance] hard fork is touted to be the first step towards the Shelley phase. Hoskinson had previously stated that this hard fork is a way how to get the protocol from the Byron phase to the Shelley phase and during this, no new coins will be created. Following the same, Cardano will introduce Ouroboros Genesis with another hard fork.

This technological update will essentially bring in a new consensus algorithm based on BFT, meaning a new consensus will be used after the hard fork.

Source: IOHK | Shelley upgrade roadmap

Thereafter, Cardano will release Byron Reboot with the new Haskell wallet backend. Elaborating on the same, Hoskinson said,

“This is the most significant release since we released the software in September of 2017. It is a 100% re-written code, security audited, built with formal methods and it’s a 100% built in-house. It looks like it is going to be after the OBFT hard fork, but probably won’t be pushed into March.”

After the aforementioned milestones have been achieved, the ecosystem is set to sail towards Goguen. This will essentially equip the network for decentralized applications [DApps] so that smart contracts can be developed and executed on the Cardano blockchain.