Cardano's Next Network Upgrade One Step Closer to Reality: What to Watch

Cardano's next protocol upgrade may be getting closer to reality, according to a recent update from Intersect, a member-based organization for the Cardano ecosystem.

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

In a fresh update, Intersect noted that ecosystem readiness made significant progress this week. For SPOs, Block production numbers on node version 11 remained stable, increasing slightly to 87% for epoch 639. Likewise, multiple major exchanges signaled readiness this week, pushing readiness by liquidity up to 77.37%.

Currently, the van Rossem hard fork initiation action sits at 62.76% DRep approval, 31.59% SPO approval and 1 constitutional vote from the Constitutional Committee (CC) with 6 members yet to vote. This means that the DRep threshold at 60% has been surpassed, with SPOs yet to meet the 51% threshold and four CC votes remaining to meet the 5 out of 7 threshold.

The van Rossem hard fork initiation governance action was submitted on Mainnet on June 16 during epoch 637. Current voting progress indicates a potential ratification within the next two epochs. Based on the governance timeline, the next possible ratification dates are June 28 or July 3, with the corresponding potential enactment dates being July 3 or July 8, respectively.

Cardano's recent developments

The public testnet for Ouroboros Leios, Musashi Dojo, was launched this week. Leios refers to the scaling solution for Cardano. A year ago, Leios was just a research paper from Input Output (IO) Research, with its next phase unveiled as a live prototype on a public testnet.

Mithril is moving into its next phase as Teragone takes over the workstream, bringing deep cryptography expertise and continuity coordinated through Intersect.

The RealFi Phase 1 Testnet is expected to go live on July 6, the first public step toward next-generation stablecoin infrastructure on Cardano.