Cardano to Welcome Major Hard Fork in January: Details

Cardano is gearing up for a significant upgrade, with expectations for the Plomin hard fork in place for January 2025. Intersect, a member-based organization for the Cardano ecosystem, has provided a recent update in this regard.

As reported earlier, the governance action for the Cardano mainnet Plomin hard fork was submitted on-chain on Dec. 20. This action marks the end of the beginning for blockchain governance. If ratified, this action will bring full governance, as stated in CIP-1694, to mainnet, ending the technical bootstrapping phase.

Intersect's most recent update anticipates that the Plomin hard fork might be activated on the Cardano mainnet in January, outlining the epoch boundary dates when the upgrade could occur. However, this is contingent upon the stake pool operators (SPOs) and Intersect Constitutional Committee (ICC) ratifying the governance action. The dates are Jan. 14, 19 and 24 (the deadline for submitting votes) and Jan. 29, 2025.

This shift is part of Cardano’s long-term vision to become a fully decentralized and self-governing blockchain. If the governance action is successfully ratified, Cardano will usher in a new era of decentralized governance.

Exchanges and dApps signal readiness

The Cardano community has been closely monitoring the progress of the governance action as well as readiness for the Plomin upgrade. In this regard, Intersect's most recent update provides information on dApps and exchanges' readiness, outlining the dApps and exchanges that have signaled their readiness for the hard fork action.

Intersect lists the first tranche of dApps, which submitted pull requests to the knowledge base and attested their readiness for the Plomin hard fork to include Danogo, Fluid Tokens, Genius Yield, Minswap, Snekdotfun, Splash, Summon, Tempo and Wanchain.

Exchanges, including Bitrue, CEX.IO, Coinbase, Crypto.com, Gate.io, Kraken, OKX and Upbit, have also stated their readiness.

As of the Jan. 6 update on the Plomin upgrade, 79% of SPOs are currently producing blocks on Node version 10. Two hundred thirteen (213) SPOs have cast their votes, with 209 voting "yes" to the upgrade, representing 17% of the stake. For Plomin to pass, at least 51% of the stake must vote "yes." The governance action for the Plomin hard fork will expire on Jan. 29.