Major Cardano Upgrade Moves Forward With Critical Dates Now in Focus

In a major milestone this week, the van Rossem hard fork initiation governance action was submitted on Cardano Mainnet, beginning the on-chain governance process for the intra-era upgrade.

The submission followed a positive Mainnet go/no-go assessment by the Hard Fork Working Group on June 15, ratified by the Technical Steering Committee on June 16, which concluded that all mandatory readiness criteria had been met and recommended progression to on-chain.

The van Rossem hard fork initiation governance action was submitted on Mainnet on epoch 637 on June 16, according to an update provided by Intersect, a member-based entity in the Cardano ecosystem.

Based on the governance timeline, the earliest possible ratification date is June 23, with the earliest possible enactment date being June 28.

Current expectations remain that both milestones are likely to occur later in the governance action lifecycle, with potential ratification dates extending through July 18 and corresponding enactment dates through July 23.

Cardano ecosystem readiness

Meanwhile, ecosystem adoption of the required infrastructure for the van Rossem hard fork continues to increase steadily, with PoolTool reporting 62% of nodes self-reporting v11.0.1 (an increase of 8% since last week) and 81% of current epoch block production occurring on Protocol Version 11 (a 5% increase).

Cexplorer's hard fork readiness metrics show about 89% of block production over the last five days was produced by v11 nodes (an increase of 4%), indicating continued progress toward ecosystem-wide readiness.

Cardano welcomed new releases for Lace and Hydra this week. Lace wallet saw advancement this week with Lace Carbon entering internal testing.

This week, Hydra 2.2.0 was released, which introduces Partial Fanout. Until now, the number of UTxOs a Hydra head could hold was capped by what fits in a single fanout transaction.