March 4, 2021 (https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/03/04/not-long -till-d-0-day/) Our research team is in the late stages of finalizing an approach. They will soon present their findings, and we will update the community then. However, the team has now concluded that a0 should change. We believe this change will greatly benefit the network, making the system more sustainable, widely distributed, and globally diverse. It will also increase the earnings of all public pools (ie, those that are not already fully 'saturated' with pledge). While it has been a matter of considerable internal discussion, we have also concluded that any change in k should come after changing the formula for a0 to deliver the desired results (especially encouraging stake to flow to smaller single pools rather than split pools). Since this is a full formula modification, and no longer a simple epoch boundary change, it needs to be released as part of a hard fork. Given our product pipelines and the team’s current focus on continuing the Goguen rollout and available dates, we will be looking to making this change in the third quarter of the year. We will also continue researching other parameters such as the minimum fees (implemented to prevent a ‘race to the bottom’ yet skewed against smaller pools) while continuing benchmarking and optimizing node performance as smart contract functionality rolls out.