Cardano just upgraded to protocol version 11 without Input Output touching a single lever. That's new. The Van Rossem hard fork, named after a contributor who died last year, passed through the network's full governance stack and activated on mainnet, marking the first major upgrade the blockchain has executed without its founding development company.
How the vote broke down
Stake pool operators backed it with 52.7% of the vote, clearing the required 51% threshold. Delegated representatives went further, with 77.6% in favour. The Constitutional Committee, which checks proposals against the project roadmap, also signed off. All three layers of Cardano's on-chain governance had to agree before a single line of code changed on mainnet, and they did.
The hard fork's practical target is Plutus execution costs. Developers running smart contracts on Cardano will pay less and see faster app performance. Every stake pool now also requires cryptographic keys as an added security layer against attacks. Routine upgrade work, but the governance process around it was anything but routine.
What comes next, and what it means for ADA
The upgrade clears the path for Ouroboros Leios, the next item on Cardano's roadmap. Leios is designed to push throughput to more than 1,000 transactions per second, roughly 65 times what the network handles today. No launch date has been set, but the groundwork is now in place.
ADA jumped 8% on the news, trading around $0.1752. Double-digit gains in a week signal fresh buying interest, though the token is still more than 95% below its all-time high. In August, Cardano plans to hand off control of core infrastructure, including the Haskell node, Plutus platform, Daedalus wallet, and Hydra scaling tool, to specialist firms outside the founding team.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Crypto assets are volatile; always do your own research before making investment decisions.
