Cardano’s Charles Hoskinson Explains the Byron to Shelley Wallet Transition

Charles Hoskinson, the CEO, and founder of IOHK, one of the firms in charge of the Cardano (ADA) blockchain project, has taken to YouTube to shed more light on the Byron to Shelley wallet transition. Hoskinson says all existing Cardano (ADA) wallets will be migrated to the BECH32 format to enable users to participate in staking voting and delegation, reports the Cardano Foundation on April 21, 2020.

Cardano Inches Closer to the Shelley Era

In an attempt to set the record straight and clear the air of misunderstanding surrounding the Byron to Shelley wallet transition, Cardano’s (ADA) Charles Hoskinson has released a YouTube video, explaining the entire process.

As stated by Hoskinson, Cardano users who still maintain both the legacy Serokell (SL) and Yoroi address, will need to migrate to the BECH32 address format which is the default address for the Shelley era.

According to Hoskinson, a firm named Serokell created unique code and random index HD wallets with large addresses during the SL era, before the Cardano team introduced a new address type for Yoroi. The Yoroi address type is much smaller than SL addresses and they are sequential indexed HD wallets.

Earlier in April, Hoskinson revealed the successful launch of the Byron reboot, a series of features created specifically to ease Cardano’s transition to the Shelley era. Now, the team has made it clear that the Shelley era will support only the Bech32 address. format.

Hoskinson said:

“The Byron reboot is the road to Shelley. It supports the legacy addresses from Serokell and Yoroi. We have turned on legacy support for Serokell because we didn’t want to confuse people by using Yoroi wallet addresses. However, when Shelley goes live, it’ll use a new wallet address BECH32. We believe that the BECH32 format is a good way of future-proofing Shelley wallets.”

Importantly, the team has hinted that Cardano users will be required to migrate their legacy wallets to Shelley and they can easily do this by clicking a button in the Shelley GUI and follow the step by step guide.

To create a new BECH32 address, users will be required to enter their spending password. Just like Byron addresses, BECH32 addresses will also come with their wallet recovery phrase, however, they will be 15 words long to improve security.

Also, Hoskinson has made it clear that rewards for the Shelley Incentivized Testnet (ITN) will be transferred from the testnet to the mainnet in a seamless process.

Hoskinson added:

“The previous incentivized testnet involved staking. There has been a question of how the rewards will be transferred from the full blockchain of the ITN. The staking rewards are aggregating into the UTXO of the ITN. We have an algorithm that can scan the UTXO and then create a snapshot of the rewards. When Shelley is launched the snapshot will be appended to the Cardano blockchain. This means new accounts will be migrated over.”

At press time, the price of Cardano (ADA) sits at $0.035, with a market cap of $918.66 million as seen on CoinMarketCap.