The first development phase of Cardano between 2017-2020. Here the network ran in a federated state until the arrival of Shelley in the summer of 2020. The Byron Reboot of March 2020 followed 18 months of work to rewrite the entire codebase and laid the groundwork for everything that has followed. This change was achieved with zero downtime for the network.

In the summer of 2020, Cardano began its’ journey towards decentralisation with the arrival of Shelley. Proof-of-Stake came alive and community ran stake pools began to take over the role of block production. This was a phased process over several months until 100% of block production was the responsibility of community pools.

Throughout 2021 Cardano began the transformation to a smart contract blockchain across 3 Hard Fork Combinator (HFC) events. Allegra in December 2020 (metadata and token locking), Mary in March 2021 (native assets) and Alonzo in September 2021 (smart contracts).

Scaling of Cardano is progressing throughout 2022. Since December 2021 regular incremental parameter changes, such as block size increases, were carried out to improve scaling and performance until major enhancements arrived in September 2022 with the Vasil HFC event. Ultimately leading to a faster network with reduced transaction sizes and reduced fees. Ongoing upgrades continue to add more cryptographic primitives to the protocol to boost interoperability efforts.

Voltaire represents the move towards decentralised governance of the Cardano network. It has been an ongoing process, an example of which can be seen in the progress of Project Catalyst - the decentralised innovation fund on Cardano. Development continues on CIP-1694, the Cardano Improvement Proposal to place ownership of the protocol fully in the hands of the community. The governance tesnet “SanhoNet”, and Intersect members-based organisation (MBO) are key components to this.