This is a summary of the content presented by IOHK’s project manager, Liz Bancroft-Turner in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GVwDqIwthk

Project Shelley Update, August 2018

The goal of project “Shelley” is to make Cardano decentralized. Three main workstreams:

Incentives — encourage stakeholders to follow the protocol. Delegation — allow users to delegate their right to create blocks to a 3rd party. Networking — enable infrastructure to support decentralization.

The project is divided into three main stages

1. Research

Done. Two research papers are published:

2. Design

Delegation specification is almost finished. One of the latest changes in the system is the gradual shift from the federation to a decentralized state. IOHK has to make sure that a sufficient amount of blocks gets produced in a decentralized mode so that the security of the system is not compromised. The core cluster will gradually “open up” more, so more slots can be won by independent nodes/pools and monitor the overall performance. If the number of created blocks is sufficient — more slots will be open in the next epoch; on the other hand, if there’re too many missed blocks — the number of available slots will stay the same or even go down for the next epoch.

The technical implementation plan is expected to be finished in a week or so, this will allow to create specific tasks for developers to work on.

Delta-Q measurements. In July design assumptions for ΔQ were validated by running a series of global network experiments between AWS data-centers across the globe. Experiment results had shown that selected system design supports high performance at world scale.

More info about the ΔQ research:

Testnet is still in design, but progress has been made. Currently, the main focus is on the deployment plan of how Shelley testnet should take over the Byron testnet.

Devops are working on designing concrete deployment solutions (scripts) for pools’ infrastructure. They need to work closely with the network architecture team to see the concrete use-cases more clearly. Most of the progress of this workstream is expected toward the end of this month.

3.Implementation

Peer discovery system is finished.

Most important tasks of delegation/incentives development are awaiting on specs implementation plans to be finished.