New testnet released for Cardano Community

• The testnet will be released in less than two weeks.
• The Shelley upgrade will remove miners from Cardano’s ecosystem. 

Charles Hoskinson, the CEO of IOHK - the company that builds Cardano - challenged the Cardano community to brace itself before the testnet launch while speaking at the  Cardano Emurgo Advisory Showcase in Japan. In particular, he stressed the fact that the community will need to be able to take correct decisions on behalf of the network. Cardano is a proof-of-stake blockchain platform. So far, control has been in the hands of the company IOHK and the non-profit Cardano Foundation.

Hoskinson insisted: 

“I’m not in charge, you are. Every one of you has to be armed with a lot of facts, a lot of information. Very soon, our protocol is going to begin rapidly decentralizing. Shelley is coming.”

Shelley is a future upgrade to Cardano, which will remove cryptocurrency miners from the equation, replacing them with a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. Hoskinson also said that the testnet would be released in less than two weeks for self-nodes, where users can run their network of Cardano nodes. The users can control their own miniature Cardano network. He said that a beta version will also be released later. 

“And we’ll wake up and Shelley’s here and that means you’re running the network. You have to make decisions. Where do we go? A or B? Left or right?” Hoskinson asked.

Hoskinson believes that Cardano community and IOHK will both prosper: 

“When we started IOHK, it was just Jeremy and me. Two people. Now we’re two hundred people. It seems like a lot, but the Cardano ecosystem has hundreds of thousands of people in it. We’ll wake up and maybe my company doubles in size, God help me. The Cardano ecosystem could have a million at that point.”