At a time when there are no official stake pools registered with Cardano, one aspiring pool, Unspent, has revealed that it helped process over 1 million ADA transactions in 4.13 hours in the latest stress test of Cardano Jormungandr v0.8.0-rc7 in anticipation of the Shelley Incentivized Testnet.

A stress test is important and gauges how reliable the system is. During execution, participants try to break the system by overwhelming it—in the case of Cardano, bombarding the network with many transactions, and ensuring that recovery is graceful. Participating stake pools then draw their data and this helps the Cardano development team measure the real behavior of the system when under distress for real rewards to ADA stakers.

Great stress test today of Cardano Jormungandr v0.8.0-rc7 in anticipation of the Shelley Incentivized Testnet. Lots of great stake pool operators coming together to support IOHK's developers and QA team. We processed 1 Million transactions in 4.13 hours. #ADA #Cardano pic.twitter.com/MtInjAtfRc

— Unspent (@unspentpool) December 5, 2019

To be precise, today’s stress test could prove important for Cardano as they seek to fine-tune and perfect the system ahead of the Incentivized Testnet launch of the Shelly Phase. The Shelly Phase marks the beginning of Cardano’s effort to completely decentralized the system, shifting transaction processing away from the Cardano Foundation to the community, a noteworthy milestone.

There are over 30 unofficial stake pools willing to support the network once Cardano is up and running at full throttle. Although a lot of details are still up in air and unconfirmed, it is likely that some of these pools won’t make the cut once the official registration process begins.

For now, ADA owners are warned to be vigilant and not to send coins to any firm(s) claiming to be a stake pool. To set the record straight, staking will be done through the official Daedalus wallet.

Besides there will be a list and detailed information of each of the registered staking pools. After that, owners will be at liberty to choose which pool to join and delegate their coins from within the Daedalus wallet.

Cardano promises to compete with Ethereum, the pioneer smart contracting platform. Their distinctive features will include scalability, a peer-reviewed code and superior transaction speeds.

The co-founder Charles Hoskinson is particular, and even though there have been delays in the past regarding the transition from Byron-the initial development phase, to Shelly, the announcement of this incentivized Testnet bodes well with supporters.

Shelly Phase, as aforementioned, is an attempt to decentralize the smart contracting network. The platform developers describe this phase as “a period of growth and development for the network” of which the transition is expected to be smooth and low risk without service interruptions.