Charles Hoskinson Hints At Emergence of Voltaire Era and What It’s Bringing To Cardano

Just a few days after the successful execution of the long-awaited Vasil hardfork, Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano (ADA) and CEO of Input Output Global, has announced that another major network upgrade is coming to the smart contract platform.

According to a Monday update from Charles Hoskinson, Cardano is gearing towards the implementation of another upgrade that will improve the governance of the blockchain, its overall performance, and user experience. This stage of development called “Voltaire” is the last on Cardano’s roadmap.

“The Age of Voltaire will soon be upon us as an ecosystem. It’s going to unlock the power of the millions of Cardano users and builders. It will also, once again, show the rest of the industry how to do decentralized governance just like we did with Staking,” Hoskinson wrote.

The Age of Voltaire will soon be upon us as an ecosystem. It's going to unlock the power of the millions of Cardano users and builders. It will also, once again, show the rest of the industry how to do decentralized governance just like we did with Staking. pic.twitter.com/HO8PgA5J2G

— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) October 3, 2022

It is said that the Voltaire era will focus on making the Cardano network a self-sustaining system. During this future developmental stage, voting and treasury systems will be introduced. In consequence, network participants will be able to use their stake and voting rights to influence the future development of the network. This is known as decentralized governance.

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“For the Cardano network to become truly decentralized, it will require not only the distributed infrastructure introduced during the Shelley era but also the capacity to be maintained and improved over time in a decentralized way. To that end, the Voltaire era will add the ability for network participants to present Cardano improvement proposals that can be voted on by stakeholders, leveraging the already existing staking and delegation process,” Cardano’s roadmap revealed.

Stages of Development on Cardano (ADA) Blockchain

Cardano’s roadmap shows five stages of development with each having specific purposes namely, Byron, Shelley, Goguen, Basho, and Voltaire. The Byron era was the first and is regarded as the foundation of the Cardano blockchain. During this stage, the network was federated.

The Shelley era of development came to optimize decentralization on Cardano. Being that this next level of growth focused on decentralizing the core of the system, it led to the introduction of delegation and incentive schemes. This reward system is what is driving stake pools and community adoption today. To note, at this stage of Cardano, it had no smart contract functionalities.

The Goguen era was a big step forward for Cardano as it led to the integration of smart contracts on the network. It added the ability to build decentralized applications (DApps) on the Ouroboros-powered blockchain. Plutus, the top smart contract development language was created during this stage of Cardano. A modified version, Plutus V2 was rolled out courtesy of the just completed Vasil hardfork combinator event.

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