Many of you will have seen us talk about our testnets, where we run the versions of Cardano and other testing simulators so we can test our products and get feedback from the community. Some of you have already been playing with the code from our GitHub repos. So as we move from the Byron to the Shelley era, we want to extend that collaboration and learn more from the great talent in our Cardano community.

With the Rust codebase for Shelley now nearing primetime, we’re asking the community to help us build out a testnet. The Shelley era is all about decentralization, so we’re taking a more decentralized approach to testing and documentation. It’s an important step in expanding the Cardano technical community and ultimately preparing everyone for the day when the community takes over the blockchain.

For some time, there has been a dedicated and vibrant best practice group on Telegram  – the Stake Pool Best Practices Telegram group (1,733 members). There’s clearly a lot of talent and interest out there. We recently pinned a survey in the channel to learn more about potential stake pool operators. We’ve had a really positive response, with over 150 full responses so far.

What’s the range of technical skills and knowledge in the community? What are people’s particular interests in staking? Are they keen hobbyists or entrepreneurs with plans to run a stake pool as a business? What equipment are they planning to use? Would marketing or other business support be useful? We asked lots of questions to learn as much as we could. Ultimately, our goal is to find out how we can support the community in implementing Shelley’s decentralized model in the most effective way we can. It is these people who’ll be helping to kick things off.

So, we’ve started harnessing the power of the Cardano community to roll out a staking testnet. We’ll be supporting this early group along the way in a number of ways.

There’s now a dedicated

A key part of the testing program will be working with people with mixed levels of technical experience, working across different platforms and configurations. The feedback from this group will ultimately make our technology easier to install, configure, and operate for everyone who follows.

The testnet will have a series of releases rolling out in three main phases.

Phase 1: The self node, aka ‘blockchain in a box’

The first stage is all about setting up and hosting a ‘self node’. You can think of a self node as ‘blockchain in a box’, a minimum viable product (MVP) for testing key capabilities. This is basically a set of tools and documentation to bootstrap your own genesis block and run a multi-node environment on your own machine, where you can see how stake pools actually operate. It’s like a complete network within a single instance.

We’ll provide instructions and invite people to run the node through various configurations and give us feedback on what they find.

But what about the network? Isn’t this supposed to be a decentralized solution we’re testing? Well, although we’re starting with the self node, we’ve coded things so you can implement more features against this self node down the line. So, as we add more functionality – namely the network and incentives components – the code developed against the self node won't have to change much or at all. That’s the plan!

So, the first phase is about establishing the basic configuration for your set-up that gives a sense of how well things are working locally. The early code will contain just the core functionality, designed to explore the fundamental capabilities. Across the stake pool task force, we’ll be learning about operating on different hardware, operating systems, cloud hosting environments, and technical skill levels. We'll get a much broader set of results data by collaborating with the task force.  

Phase 2: Connecting the network

Once we’re happy with phase 1, and have a robust set of self nodes up and running, we’ll start connecting them up. The goal will be to create a single, unified testnet and to add more nodes as we go, scaling the network step by step. So, instead of experimenting within your own instance, you’ll now be moving to a system where you’re talking to nodes across the internet. You're gossiping, you're downloading blocks from peers. And then we’ll be learning from a whole new set of behaviors and potential risk scenarios.

Phase 3: The incentives system

This is where we add in a networked incentive system. Moving blocks around is all very well. But Shelley’s true potential will be realized with staking. This is about demonstrating how staking rewards will go to the stake pools to encourage that.

So, at a high level, that's what you’ll see in the coming months. We'll also be working closely with the folks at EMURGO on this. They’ll be helping with testing and also ensuring that their Yoroi wallet has all this interoperability. Seiza, their new blockchain explorer, will be a great tool for visualizing a lot of the things that we do that are unique in our ecosystem.

This testing program is an experiment in community collaboration. There’ll be a lot of testing, re-coding, improving documentation and training materials, tweaking, and so on along the way. We’ll be checking the integrity of individual components as well as demonstrating that those components play with each other nicely. The objective is clear, but it’ll be interesting to see how we get there. We’re committed to it because it fits: a decentralized process to test a decentralized system. And a broad collaboration with the community to test a system that will be owned by the community.

We’ll keep you all posted. For those who choose to step up and work with us in the program, a sincere thanks in advance to you for your partnership.

I’m in the Georgian capital Tbilisi this week, enjoying the sights and sounds of one of the most innovative regions of the Caucasus. After nearly a year of groundwork, I’m here with IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson to sign Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) partnerships with the government and two of Georgia's largest universities. The MoUs with the Ministry of Education, the Free University of Tbilisi, and the Business and Technology University of Tbilisi mark a commitment by the Georgian administration to work with IOHK and use Cardano to fuel innovation in the country. After signing the MoU, Mikheil Batiashvili, the Minister of Education, Science, Culture, and Sport, spoke of Georgia’s rapid development, and how he hoped that “leveraging IOHK’s world-leading expertise, particularly in third-generation blockchain technology, will help us to progress even further toward our goal of being the world’s leading country for secure, digitally-enabled international business”.

One of the core goals of the MoUs signed this week is to enable the use of Cardano-backed blockchain technology to store, track, and verify educational credentials such as degree certificates, removing the need for time-consuming and expensive manual verification. The system will be implemented in Georgia first, with a further goal of using distributed ledger technology to support the Europe-wide Bologna Process, an intergovernmental effort to improve the internationalization of higher education. IOHK has looked at a similar application of this technology already in Greece, where it worked with government education authorities to explore a pilot project to verify student qualifications on the blockchain.

It’s not just the education sector that stands to benefit from collaboration with IOHK. Charles also met with the Minister of Agriculture and the Georgian prime minister to discuss other applications of blockchain technology for the country, such as supporting new fintech businesses, supply chain implementations, and integrating smart contract functionality into government processes.

“We are incredibly excited to be working with the Georgian government on a range of projects across business, education, and government services,” Charles said. “IOHK is pleased to be a part of the country’s journey and looks forward to developing the blockchain ecosystem in Georgia and helping its people to solve the challenges they face.”

IOHK has collaborated with Georgian institutions before. Research fellow Peter Gaži gave a lecture on Ouroboros, IOHK’s proof-of-stake protocol, at the Free University of Tbilisi. In January a Cardano meetup was sponsored by the Ministry of Economy and Sustainable Development of Georgia and the Georgian Innovation and Technology Agency, where Edsko de Vries, a Haskell consultant working on Cardano, gave a well-received talk.

This week’s agreements strengthen IOHK’s relationship with Georgia. The next steps will be to organize workshops, meetups, and forums to identify the most pressing challenges that can be tackled using Cardano, Atala, or a combination of both. IOHK and the Georgian government will work together to embed blockchain technology in systems across the country, proving just how valuable a digital, forward-thinking mindset can be.