The Cardano Shelley Hybrid Era and the d parameter
Hi, we’re ADABros.com (Ticker: ABRO) Cardano Stake Pool and we are excited to share this latest development. This write up and info is sourced from the original video posted by Charles Hoskinson CEO of IOHK and founder of Cardano.

A quick recap of what Cardano is; it is the 3rd generation block chain technology that was launched in September 2017 built around peer reviewed papers; where ADA is the native token that runs on this platform. It has been designed from ground up to address the following three shortfalls of 1st generation (Bitcoin) and 2nd generation (Ethereum) Crypto currencies:

Scalability (Transactions / second speed, Network bandwidth, Data storage)

(Transactions / second speed, Network bandwidth, Data storage) Interoperability (Work with many Crypto currencies out there, become trustworthy with banks)

(Work with many Crypto currencies out there, become trustworthy with banks) Sustainability (Who pays for the development, who gets to decide what we work on)

On July 29th 2020 Cardano network transitioned into shelley era with a hard fork. We have this concept of d (decentralisation) parameter and right now it’s set to d=1. It’s kind of like a wall that gets slowly but surely get taken down.

The Cardano network gets fully decentralised when d=0. What the d parameter represent is the proportion of the block that are made by the stake pool operators (such as ADABros), not the OBFT protocol managed by IOHK.

Right now the network is operating in a static and federated mode, so these IOHK’s OBFT pools are operating at for no profit whats so ever, just making blocks and upholding the network.

Now that the hard fork is done, all the logic is in place to turn on Ouroboros Praos, which is what shelley is running under. This is accomplished by setting d parameter to something less than 1, which means a percentage of blocks will be made by the Stake Pool Operators (SPO), instead of the OBFT nodes.

There are three phases to this and is determined by the value of d parameter:

On the 14th of August 2020, a blog post will be released by IOHK that outlines the steps to bring down the value of d parameter towards 0.

We will have a new variable (let’s call it alpha α) that will act as a constant decay rate of the d parameter. Every epoch (where 1 epoch is 5 days), the value of d will decrement by the value of α marching towards 0.

Initial straw man value appears to be around 0.025, which means approximately in 200 days the d parameter will be 0 where the network will achieve complete decentralisation.
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['Smart Contracts', 'Cryptocurrency', 'Cardano', 'Shelly', 'Staking']