OBFT Hard Fork Date Announced By Hoskinson

• With the ecosystem for Cardano highly looking forward to the transfer of the Shelley testnet to mainnet, there is a big step forward in the OBFT hard fork.
• Charles Hoskinson revealed that the OBFT hard fork will end up happening later this month on the 20th of February.

With the ecosystem for Cardano highly looking forward to the transfer of the Shelley testnet to mainnet, there is a big step going on in the OBFT hard fork. In a live stream session, the CEO of IOHK, Charles Hoskinson revealed that the OBFT hard fork will end up happening later this month on the 20th of February.

He said:

“The OBFT hard fork, tentatively, tentatively, tentatively, I said three times, looks like the date is going to be Feb 20. We were originally thinking it to be on the 14th but we wanted a few extra days for certain partners. So we suspect that February 20th is when we’re going to do the hard fork.”

The Ouroboros BFT (Ouroboros Byzantine Fault Tolerance) hard fork is extremely anticipated throughout the Cardano community. The CEO has previously stated that such a hard fork is how the protocol will go from the Byron phase to the Shelley phase. Throughout this, no new coins will be created. Going off this, Cardano will be bringing in Ouroboros Genesis in yet another hard fork.

Such a technological upgrade will essentially bring in a new consistent algorithm based on BFT. This will mean a new consensus will be used following completion. So Cardano will be releasing a Byron Reboot with the new Haskell wallet backend in the future. 

Adding onto this, the CEO said:

“This is the most significant release since we released the software in September of 2017. It is a 100% re-written code, security audited, built with formal methods and it’s a 100% built in-house. It looks like it is going to be after the OBFT hard fork, but probably won’t be pushed into March.”

After all this is completed, the ecosystem is well on its way towards Goguen. The network will be rightly equipped for decentralised applications from here, so that smart contracts can be developed on the blockchain for Cardano.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. For more news on this and other crypto updates, keep it with CryptoDaily!