Cardano's 2026 Hard Fork Proposal Goes Public, Is This Turning Point?

In a new development, Intersect, a member-based organization for the Cardano ecosystem, has submitted a proposal on the naming of Cardano's next upgrade.

In a tweet, Intersect disclosed that its Hard Fork Working Group has put forward a proposal to name Cardano’s next upgrade, Protocol Version 11, the van Rossem Hard Fork, in honor of Max van Rossem.

This is in line with the tradition of naming hard forks in memory of notable historical figures or significant contributors to the Cardano community.

This trend started with the Byron era, which marked the first crucial technology developments for Cardano and continues to date, with the Vasil, Valentine, Chang and Plomin hard forks named after notable Cardano community members who passed away.

The intra-era hardfork to Protocol Version 11 introduces improvements across security, governance and Plutus capability.

About Cardano Protocol Version 11

Late last year, Intersect announced a proposed Cardano intra-era hard fork to Protocol Version 11.

This upgrade will introduce improvements to Plutus's performance, ledger consistency and node security without transitioning to a new ledger era. These changes will touch on Plutus primitives, VRF key uniqueness and reference input rules.

The updates represent the next tranche of treasury-funded development work for the Cardano network.

Cardano's recent developments

The Cardano Constitution requires the establishment of a Net Change Limit (NCL) through a newly submitted proposal, which defines the maximum amount of lovelace that can be withdrawn from the treasury during an established period of time. The Net Change Limit will be 350,000,000,000,000 lovelace (350 million ADA), which is the maximum amount that can be withdrawn from the treasury during this specific period.

In addition, Cardano Leios upgrade might be journeying its way toward the mainnet. IOG’s public Leios tracker shows progress on the Cardano Improvement Proposal, with delivery work actively progressing across specs, simulations and implementation.