coindesk.com
Cardano activated its Van Rossem hard fork on Saturday, moving the mainnet to protocol version 11. The technical changes lower smart contract costs and lay groundwork for an upcoming scalability overhaul.
But a more consequential change is who directed the upgrade. For the first time in Cardano's history, it wasn't Input Output, the engineering firm that designed and built the blockchain.
Every previous Cardano hard fork was coordinated top-down by the network’s founding entities, chiefly Input Output, but Van Rossem was initiated, debated and ratified entirely through Cardano's onchain governance system, the framework introduced in the so-dubbed Voltaire era that lets stakeholders vote directly on protocol changes.
It is the first Cardano upgrade approved end-to-end by the network's own participants rather than its creators.
Onchain data from Cardanoscan shows the network moved from version 10 in epoch 643 to version 11 in epoch 644, with the action enacted activated Saturday, July 18 at 21:44 UTC after ratification on July 13. Passage required sign-off from three separate bodies, and the tallies show how differently each treated it.
Delegated representatives — or stakeholders that ADA holders elect to vote on governance proposals on their behalf, similar to representatives in a parliament — voted 78.97% in favor against a 60% threshold.
The constitutional committee, a body of elected members that rules only on whether a proposal complies with the Cardano Constitution rather than on its merits, found the hard fork compliant, with all seven members agreeing where five were required.
Interestingly, the pool operators who actually run Cardano's infrastructure approved the community's first self-directed hard fork by the narrowest of its three margins, with 53.02% of operators voting to approve the upgrade, a reminder that decentralized governance means the founders' preferred outcome is no longer guaranteed.
Under Cardano's constitution, the upgrade also required at least 85% of stake pools by active stake to run compatible node software before ratification. Network telemetry showed adoption well ahead of that, with roughly 93% of block production already on version 11 heading into activation.
What is version 11
On the technical side, version 11 is an intra-era hard fork, meaning it stays within Cardano's current governance-focused era and does not change the structure of transactions, so the work required to upgrade is minimal for the wider ecosystem.