cointelegraph.com
20 July 2026 05:08, UTC
Cardano has activated its van Rossem hard fork as of Saturday, upgrading the Cardano mainnet to version 11, which is expected to lower smart contract execution costs and lay the groundwork for Ouroboros Leios, a major scalability upgrade for the protocol.
Onchain data from Cardanoscan shows the network moved from Protocol Version 10 in epoch 643 to Version 11 in epoch 644.
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“As well as Plutus improvements and Plutus Cost Model enhancements, this upgrade lays the foundation for the next upgrade, the Dijkstra era hard fork, which will introduce Ouroboros Leios to Cardano,” Input Output wrote in a weekly development report on Friday.
Ouroboros Leios is a scaling proposal for the Ouroboros proof-of-stake consensus used by Cardano, expected to launch in late 2026. Its goal is to drastically increase transactions per second without weakening Ouroboros’ security guarantees.
The van Rossem upgrade is also the first governance-driven hard fork in Cardano’s history, unlike previous upgrades that were coordinated by Input Output, the engineering company that designed and built the Cardano blockchain.
