Shelley Hardfork has been Initiated

good evening hello from warm and sunny colorado it's been a long day a very very long day on the back of a very long week and on behalf of input output global our product team our engineers our scientists and each and every employee and contractor that worked with us to get us here it is our pleasure to announce that a little after 5 p.m mountain standard time today samuel leathers our director of devops initiated the update proposal to the cardano main network and we have now begun the countdown over the next five days to hard fork cardano from byron to shelly our last chance to abort will be sometime in monday during the weekend the engineers and qa team will be conducting an exhaustive 72-hour burn-in to go through all the checklists that we have we did a pre-launch checklist and now we're going back to the second one should nothing come up the update will be endorsed and the fork will occur without delay or disruption on the 29th every indication we have is the sky is blue the weather's good and we are now counting down towards launch i'd also like to thank all the stake pool operators who tirelessly over the last few months worked with our team to help us get to this day they tested a lot of software they found a lot of bugs they really pushed us and we were better for it i'd like to thank all the exchange partners who have worked with us for the last two months they've done an unbelievable effort and job giving us great advice everything from rosetta to things as trivial as some nuances on the apis it's been a long road to get here a lot longer than just the last few months cardano began in 2015 as a dream we wanted to build something that could deliver the promises that bitcoin had back in 2009 not as an experiment but as a system that could evolve over time to meet the needs of billions of people and provide an economic identity to those billions of people with power pushed to the edges always getting more decentralized and always getting faster more capable and ultimately better for us all this is in many ways a small step towards that vision and in other ways it's a giant leap forward because unlike every other update in the history of the project we are now moving from a static and federated system to a dynamic and decentralized system and our community has proven beyond a reason of a doubt over the last six months that they are well more than capable of taking custody of this dream and taking it to the next level it's always a stressful time when you go through these transitions but i am stunned by the profound effort wisdom and capability of those that stepped up thank you it really means a lot to me it really means a lot to all of us if this is the army we have to go and win the war with i don't even think it's a question of whether we're going to win or not it's just a question of when each and every one of you earned this day as much as everyone else and some of you more so than others so it's a long road ahead but this is a great moment and it's one that long overdue sorry it took so long to get here but we did our best and it looks we hit every deadline we set back in may which is a new thing for the project as a whole the road ahead is not going to be as hard with respect to gigantic disruptive upgrades a lot more iterative things are coming native assets smart contracts overlay protocols new capabilities and those are definitely going to be fun but this is really the last time that we're going to be able to do something this profound because from here on out cardano is the best cryptocurrency on market when we think about it compared to bitcoin and as soon as we get native assets and smart contracts we're the best cryptocurrency bar none and that really is a testimony to the work that was done it's not easy to say that you're going to go do something as crazy as build a cryptocurrency it's not easy to embrace something with that order of work cryptography protocol design distributed systems there's so many moving pieces so much complex computer science so much complex engineering every person who says they got it right suddenly a bug occurs and coins are printed out of thin air or the network goes down or a hack happens or you have to centralize something to say that we're going to take something as big and profound as bitcoin and build something better and do it half the time that it took the bitcoin to reach the scale and do it with principles that's always been the bedrock of what we've attempted and today we succeeded in that respect cardano will be in the hands of hundreds and eventually thousands and eventually tens of thousands of stake pool operators and every single person who holds ada will have a voice and be able to influence the system and decide the stewardship of the system that's exactly what we signed up for back in 2009.