“There is no delay of Shelley. Pioneer is set for launch today,” tweeted Cardano creator Charles Hoskinson.

On Pioneer day, Hoskinson shared a video where he talked about how everything is on schedule as the pool operators got together to get the plumbing done.

They have turned on the friends and family testnet today and Hoskinson is “very happy about the outcome.”

Friends and family testnet is up and running. We are going to iron out the major issues over the upcoming days and then, we will start onboarding more stake pool operators very soon. #cardano #shelley #haskell pic.twitter.com/TDl91T9Ue8

— Stake Nuts (@stakenuts) May 11, 2020

“Throughout the week we're gonna be rolling a lot of cool stuff out to the pioneers and they're gonna be living the Oregon Trail for a little bit,” said Hoskinson, who is the CEO of IOHK.

With the testing going on, the public Haskell testnet is not so long now and they will be making announcements “very soon” about when that's going to hit based upon feedback from the pioneers.

We got the initial set of pioneers in Telegram and just finished the opening call. Who is ready for some Oregon Trail pic.twitter.com/1KFMCRLSrn

— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) May 11, 2020

He also shared that Cardano’s team has started talking about the next generation of paper wallets, with Vacuum Labs already working full-time at Ledger for Daedalus. The CIP process is already out, the first generation of it with a lot of discussions going around the voting and democracy side door.

“Can't spoil anything yet but I'll just say that things are happening there sooner than you think and pioneers are kicking ass,” Hoskinson said. He asked the community to hang in there as May is going to be a very busy month.

Shelley is coming or Hoskinson will become a “monk”

In his video from the weekend, Hoskinson shot down any rumors about Shelley not launching in 2020 by saying that he will “become a monk and wander the world” if Shelley upgrade doesn’t become a reality this year.

The reason behind his confidence is the Shelley node running.

The node for Shelley mainnet is already up and running which means the launch of Cardano's proof-of-stake (PoS) era is all that much closer now. Launched about five years ago, finally, Pioneer’s program will start testing Shelley.

Hoskinson shared that the rollout of the Shelley mainnet will be in several phases to get it right. Now, it’s just a matter of getting the plunging right, distributing it and getting people to install it and use it.

The Github repository is for all to see that makes it further clear that Shelley node is about ready to go, “It’s imminent,” he said.

Meanwhile, ADA is enjoying greens of 4.38% trading at $0.05. In the past month, this 11th largest cryptocurrency by market cap recorded gains of 51%, as such it is up over 49% YTD.