Announcement - 4th Feburary 2020 - OBFT hard fork on the Byron maninnet
IMPORTANT CARDANO ANNOUNCEMENT: ACTION REQUIRED
Are you running cardano-sl 3.0.3? Now is the time to make sure you are!
On the 20th of February, IOHK will make an important update as part of the journey to launching Shelley era functionality on the Cardano main net. After full testing on our testnet, we are now preparing to switch the main net from the original consensus protocol Ouroboros Classic (Byron Era) to an updated version, Ouroboros BFT.
In order to ensure your customers experience no service disruption, it is important that you upgrade to a supported version of Cardano before we do this.
Why are we doing this?
The primary purpose of the Ouroboros BFT update is to provide a simpler migration pathway from Ouroboros Classic to Ouroboros Praos. This is an important step towards the beginning of the Shelley era on mainnet. While technically this update can be referred to as a ‘hard fork’, it is a planned and managed protocol upgrade that will act as a bridge from Ouroboros Classic to Ouroboros Praos, which will power the Shelley era.
What is Ouroboros BFT?
Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) is a class of simple consensus algorithms, and Ouroboros BFT is a BFT algorithm that belongs to the Ouroboros family. The Ouroboros family also contains Ouroboros Classic, the protocol which is currently running on the Cardano main net. When we fully migrate to the decentralized Shelley era later this year, we shall implement Ouroboros Praos.
When will the OBFT update take place?
On Thursday the 20th of February 21:44:51 (pm) UTC, Epoch 176, we will switch the main net from the original consensus protocol Ouroboros Classic (Byron Era) to Ouroboros BFT via a protocol update in the first of the two planned hard forks.
What you need to do
To ensure any customers holding ada experience no issues or interruption of service, we strongly urge and recommend all exchanges using the Cardano settlement layer (SL) to upgrade to cardano-sl 3.0.3 ( Cardano 1.6.0). If you are on cardano-sl 3.0.3, you should experience no issues.
However, if you are running an earlier version or are using other methods of connecting to the mainnet we ask that you get in touch immediately. We’ll be happy to support you.
If you are using a custom wallet solution or SDK to create and sign transactions including the HTTP Bridge please get in touch. While the HTTP Bridge will support the OBFT hard fork it is approaching its end of life and will be deprecated in due course.
What comes after OBFT?
OBFT will be maintained until we are ready to deploy Ouroboros Praos, which will support Shelley’s features on the main net. At that point, the second fork will take place - again with the cooperation of our exchange partners.
If you have any questions or concerns whatsoever, please reply direct to this mail or reach out via exchange@iohk.io and the usual support channels.