This week, the Cardano network reached a significant milestone with the official launch of the van Rossem hard fork governance proposal on its mainnet. The move initiates a critical on-chain governance process for Cardano, paving the way for the network’s next major upgrade and signaling increasing maturity in Cardano’s decentralized decision-making.
Technical approvals pave way for upgrade
The governance proposal comes after the Hard Fork Working Group, following a comprehensive readiness assessment on June 15, declared the Cardano mainnet prepared for the van Rossem hard fork. The Technical Steering Committee gave its confirmation a day later, verifying that all mandatory technical requirements had been met, thus clearing the proposal for the next governance stage on the blockchain.
According to an update from Intersect, an organization responsible for governance and coordination within the Cardano ecosystem, the formal action to trigger the van Rossem hard fork was submitted to the mainnet during epoch 637 on June 16. Intersect stands out as a membership-driven body playing a key role in the network’s evolving governance frameworks.
Intersect reported that the governance action initiating the van Rossem hard fork was presented to the Cardano mainnet on June 16, coinciding with epoch 637.
Flexible timeline for approval and activation
The released governance calendar highlights June 23 as the earliest date for approving the proposal, with the earliest possible activation of the upgrade set for June 28. However, network participants anticipate that both steps could occur later, depending on the flow of the governance cycle and overall preparedness across the ecosystem.
Accordingly, approval could be delayed until as late as July 18, with the subsequent activation potentially extending to July 23. This flexibility provides time for stakeholders to ready their infrastructure and aligns with Cardano’s consensus-driven approach to upgrades and governance.
| Stage | Earliest date | Latest possible date |
|---|---|---|
| Approval | June 23 | July 18 |
| Go-live | June 28 | July 23 |
Network adoption and software upgrades accelerate
Meanwhile, infrastructure adoption within the Cardano ecosystem continues to gain momentum. Latest figures from PoolTool indicate that 62% of network nodes have already upgraded to version 11.0.1, marking an 8-point increase over the previous week. Additionally, 81% of blocks are currently being produced under Protocol Version 11, representing a further 5-point rise and reflecting growing readiness for the upgrade.
Indicators from Cexplorer, which monitors hard fork preparations, show similar progress: approximately 89% of blocks produced in the past five days have come from v11 nodes, an increase of 4 points from prior measurements. These data underline the network’s rapid transition toward broad-based protocol adoption.
The fact that nearly 89% of recent block production has been managed by v11 nodes demonstrates the growing preparedness of the network, as shown by the latest tracking statistics.
In other developments, new releases were announced this week for both the Lace wallet and the Hydra protocol. The Lace wallet entered internal testing with its new Lace Carbon version, while Hydra rolled out version 2.2.0, which introduces the Partial Fanout feature.
Previously, the number of UTxOs (unspent transaction outputs) that could be held inside a Hydra head was restricted by the capacity of a single fanout process. With Partial Fanout in version 2.2.0, the protocol offers a more flexible approach, easing those previous limitations and enhancing off-chain scalability for Cardano.
Glossary: Hydra is Cardano’s Layer 2 scaling solution, designed to boost transaction throughput. UTxO stands for unspent transaction output, a fundamental component for managing network balances and transaction structures.
