In a recent AMA session, IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson made some important announcements regarding the Cardano project – in short, September should be a pretty exciting month for Cardano fans. A useful timestamped recap of the session has also been posted on the Cardano forums by Eric Czuleger, a content writer working at IOHK.

Hoskinson revealed that Cardano’s networking testnet is set to launch in September, potentially as early as Sep 15. This will be the next step following the rust client testnet, which has already resulted in “hundreds of bugs” being resolved. Hoskinson summarized what the networking testnet phase will entail:

“The second phase is the networking testnet, where we actually have people connect to a unified testnet and do some form of staking. So, everything that you’d want to do with Shelley, done now instead of your PC on a distributed system.”

The next phase will be the “incentivized testnet”, where users will be rewarded for staking their tokens.

The date for the launch of the incentivized testnet will be revealed on September 28. Hoskinson says that the incentivized testnet launch will effectively represent the launch of the “Shelley” phase of Cardano’s development.

Cardano will also be showcasing a major update for Plutus programming language for smart contracts at the WyoHackathon in September.