Cardano has reached six years since the Shelley upgrade, which introduced staking, decentralized block production, and community governance. The anniversary highlights the network's evolution from a federated model to a fully decentralized proof-of-stake ecosystem. Over 2,882 active stake pools now support approximately 21.56 billion ADA in live stake, according to Cexplorer data.
The transition began with the Byron hard fork, which replaced Cardano's original node software with a modular foundation. Shelley then enabled ADA holders to delegate to pools, removing centralized validation, and by Q1 2021 stake pool operators took over all block production. Today, Input Output is focusing on Ouroboros Leios, Cardano's biggest scaling upgrade. Leios is currently testing on the public Musashi Dojo testnet across five phases—Earth, Water, Fire, Wind, and Void—designed to verify stability before mainnet deployment. Input Output estimates Leios could boost base-layer throughput by five to twenty times. The earlier Van Rossem hard fork laid the groundwork for the Dijkstra era, which will introduce Leios to the mainnet.
