Just four days after Cardano’s successful launch of the Shelley hard fork, there are over 600 active stake pools. 

According to data compiled by ADAPools.org, Cardano has currently 623 active stake pools, representing a relative peak following the launch of Shelley. The pools, which allow users to participate in the staking protocol, have a collective 2.74 billion ADA committed to staking and improving the network’s decentralization. 

Cardano, which has billed itself as an open-source smart-contract platform to rival Ethereum, hard-forked to the decentralized Shelley network on July 29. According to the official press release by the Cardano Foundation, users can now register as stake pool operators or delegate their ADA to pools in order to generate rewards: 

As the number of registered stake pools increases, the Cardano blockchain will become progressively more decentralized. Once the Cardano mainnet has reached 1,000 pools, Cardano will become one of the most decentralized, scalable, and secure blockchains to date.

Wednesday’s hard fork transitioned Cardano away from the Byron network, which the Foundation claimed would bring the platform “one-step closer” to smart contract capabilities and the deployment of decentralized applications (DApps). 

Yesterday (August 1), Charles Hoskinson sent out a tweet that contained a screenshot from “Cardano PoolTool” in order to show that IOHK’s own stake pools are now operating:

The reason for tickers for these pools having an “IOG” prefix is that in the future IOHK is being rebranded:

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