Cardano continues strong on its path to full decentralization as IOHK delivered on its word. December 6th, as projected, IOHK announced that Shelley’s K parameter has been increased to 500. The significance of the update is to allow more stake pools to mint blocks and get rewarded. Additionally, the percentage of blocks assigned to Community pools increased by 6% instead of the regular 2%:

“So we have now successfully moved k to 500 – #Decentralization continues apace! Some of you may also have noticed that the percentage of blocks assigned to #Cardano community pools has increased today by 6% instead of the usual rate of 2% per epoch.”

The increased k-parameter defines the saturation level. As the k parameter increases, the amount pledges it takes to reach the saturation level decreases. At saturation level, a pool enjoys maximum rewards for minting blocks. Community members also testify to this update, MK (@MK28406173) reported:

“my stake pool jumped from 28% saturation to 85% saturation since the last epoch. I’ve noticed the saturation levels increased in a similar fashion in many stake pools…”

The Shelley hardfork has been a total success for Cardano. Metrics showed that as of December 5, the total number of delegators is 93,261 while a total of 20,290,000,000 ADA has been staked.

More Cardano Use Cases as it shines Bright into a Goguen-filled Future

Cardano continues to move towards Goguen while it makes the most out of its current state. With Goguen, the network will welcome an influx of smart contracts, Decentralized Applications, and ultimately more use cases. The developers, however, are not waiting for Goguen, they are doing everything they can with the network as it is. Cardano’s track and trace implementations have been gaining a lot of momentum lately. One was the Beefchain that uses RFID and IoT “devices to track and upload information about individual cattle to the blockchain, providing verifiable credentials for the origin of beef products via blockchain technology”.

Cardano foundation Team on December 2nd announced that it developed a metadata connector for Scantrust supply chain tracking. Scantrust provides digitization and supply chain tracking for fortune 500 enterprises and many SMEs in many countries of the world. For the Cardano blockchain-powered transactional metadata connector, Scantrust is collaborating with Baias’ Wine:

“Through Scantrust, each bottle of wine produced by Baia’s Wine will carry a unique QR-identifier connected to metadata on the Cardano blockchain, allowing every bottle to be easily traced from the grape to the table. The proof of concept solution will allow for detailed data visualization built from every touchpoint along Baia’s Wine supply chain journey.”

There is no stopover in the exciting updates from Cardano, 2021 looks very bright.