On the way to launching the Shelley era functionality, Cardano has introduced an important update on February 20. The IOHK team announced the successful completion of its Ouroboros BFT hard fork, which has replaced the original consensus protocol, Ouroboros Classic (Byron Era).

UPDATE: #Cardano OBFT hard fork successfully completed! 🚀 👏 🥳



Cardano recently underwent a mainnet hard fork (=software protocol update) on 20-02-2020, during epoch 176, to pave the way for the "#Shelley" mainnet release. pic.twitter.com/Uemla5AKoG — Cardano Community (@Cardano) February 21, 2020

The Cardano team recently released Cardano Haskell implementation that consisted of Cardano node and Cardano Explorer Backend, and web API. Haskell was another move towards Cardano’s preparation for Shelley and Goguen and paved way for third-party developers and enterprise solutions.

Tim Harrison, IOHK Communications Director commented on the hard fork in a recent video. According to Harrison, the OBFT update is a very important step as the protocol heads towards the Shelley era on mainnet.

Ouroboros is an advanced PoS protocol and Harrison claims the implementation of OFBT will act as a bridge between Ouroboros Classic, on the Bryon mainnet and Ouroboros Genesis, on the Shelley era.

Together with Haskell’s implementation, this latest update will allow Cardano to migrate the core nodes that create blocks. The team had earlier noted that, the new developments will also lead to significant ‘transactions per second’ performance improvements.

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