During the early epochs of the new Shelley era, a variable will affect the outcome of block production by independent pools.
What the d parameter represent is the proportion of the block that are made by the stake pool operators (such as BeBop), not the OBFT protocol managed by IOHK.
Right now the network is operating in a static and federated mode, so these IOHK’s OBFT pools are operating at for no profit whats so ever, just making blocks and upholding the network.
Now that the hard fork is done, all the logic is in place to turn on Ouroboros Praos, which is what Shelly is running under.
This is accomplished by setting d parameter to something less than 1, which means a percentage of blocks will be made by the Stake Pool Operators (SPO), instead of the OBFT nodes.
There are three phases to this and is determined by the value of d parameter. In the image below you can find the steps to bring down the value of d parameter towards 0.
All this will translate into lower rewards for the pools, and consequently for the delegators, especially in the initial phase. However, this situation should improve as the epochs pass.
We will have a new variable (let’s call it alpha α) that will act as a constant decay rate of the d parameter. Every epoch (where 1 epoch is 5 days), the value of d will decrement by the value of α marching towards 0.
For a more detailed explanation here is a video by Charles Hoskinson discussing this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiDHg-Ql2hU&t=8s
