According to the latest roadmap update from Cardano, the highly innovative blockchain developer is nearly halfway through the development of its Cardano Testnet.

As well as improving the existing Cardano blockchain and testing for a completely decentralized protocol, the next upgrade for Cardano will also add instant functionality for ADA owners and users.

Nulltx.com rates five of the changes planned by Cardano in its Version 1.4 upgrade in ascending order based on the benefits for the ecosystem:

The popular Daedelus wallet will be available in full to Linux users. The Shelley Testnet will be a major step towards trialing decentralization for Cardano, adding the functionality to test stake pools and delegation of stake while allowing users to provide feedback to Cardano. A Cardano Testnet will be added as a publicly available test environment for developers, community members, and trading platforms. It will run code one iteration ahead of the live blockchain , again allowing developers to test new features. Cardano will add its “Rust” project, which uses the lightweight programming language Rust, simplifying web and application developments. It will be an open source sandbox for developers which the Cardano team hopes will turn into a thriving community. The upgrade will improve block storage significantly, increasing Cardano’s blockchain network speed and using less hard drive volume for users.

Suggested Reading : Learn how Cardano differs from another dapp platform—Ethereum.

Though development for the Cardano Testnet is at 45% of completion, the main Shelley Testnet upgrade is around 15% completed.

Work on the Cardano Ouroboros Delegation Research Paper is finished and the actual coding development is now in its early stages. Delegation of stake will be key to Cardano’s final decentralized main net operation and governance.

Cardano explains:

“In a proof-of-stake system such as Cardano, stakeholders have an obligation to take part in the protocol. To make this practical, stakeholders are able to delegate their obligations to others — so-called stake pools — which are able to fulfill the obligations.”

This means participating ADA owners can either contribute themselves or delegate their network influence to “stake pools”. Cardano published full details of the roadmap update on its forum and talked extensively about some of these features and the long-term innovations planned by the IOHK team in a meeting at Google’s London Offices in July.