According to a recent article about IOHK’s CEO Charles Hoskinson participated in a “Ask Me Anything” session. The article mentions that during the latest session, the topic of software compatibility for staking and how to prevent and provide countermeasures in the event of a 51 percent attack came up.

Concerning the Shelley mainntest release, Hoskinson stated, “Shelley will happen this year a 100 percent. I will eat my own shoe, if it does not.”

The Shelley Project’s goal is to be fully decentralized and anonymous and to have three main work streams for decentralization.

IOHK Project Manager Liz Bancroft stated, “For incentives, this is about encouraging stakeholders to follow the protocol and assure that the system runs smoothly for delegation this is about allowing users to hand over their right to sign blocks to a third party and for networking it’s about enabling the infrastructure to support decentralization.”

The AMA session continued onto the topic of how the platform will be able to handle a 51 percent attack, if such were to ever happen on the network. Hoskinson responded that such an attack would be very difficult, considering Cardano’s high market cap.

Another element that may be preventing the attack is the price increase of ADA, which means that the procedure would be very difficult. However, he also did share a solution, stating “The first process in mitigation is to freeze the perpetrators in the network by conducting a soft fork or a hard fork.

This will only affect the individuals and not the network, in a way it may even increase the value of ADA. There are also checkpoints provided at relative intervals provided with trusted hardware.”