All Eyes on Cardano as Major Hard Fork Goes Live in Hours

All eyes are on Cardano, as its much-awaited intra-era hard fork is set to go live in the next few hours.

The van Rossem hard fork governance action met the required ratification thresholds across all voting groups on July 13 and was subsequently ratified at the epoch boundary of Epoch 643. According to protocol, the hard fork will automatically be enacted on the next epoch boundary on July 18, 2026 at 21:44:51 UTC (slot height: 192,844,800).

As well as Plutus improvements and Plutus Cost Model enhancements, the van Rossem hard fork lays the foundation for the next upgrade, the Dijkstra era hard fork, which will introduce Ouroboros Leios to Cardano.

The ledger gave priority to the hard fork ratification over all other actions, with the potential to delay any other governance actions that would ratify simultaneously. However, no other governance actions were directly impacted, delayed, or expired as a result of the hard fork governance action reaching ratification.

Intersect, a member-based entity in the Cardano ecosystem, has highlighted an ongoing countdown to the van Rossem hard fork enactment, with members of the community urged to join a public call to watch it happen.

van Rossem represents an intra-era hard fork to Protocol Version 11 and will boost Plutus performance, improve ledger consistency as well as the security of nodes. This upgrade also introduces enhanced primitives, VRF key uniqueness, and updated reference input rules.

Cardano ecosystem sees progress

Work continues on the Leios testnet, with the release of two prototype builds — prototype-2026w27a and prototype-2026w28 — with the team fixing several bugs identified during testnet runs. The team also implemented a voting dashboard to improve Leios’s observability, showing how endorser blocks are voted on and certified.

The Cardano Foundation has joined x402 as an Associate Member under the Linux Foundation. x402 is an open payment standard that revives the HTTP 402 status code so that applications and AI agents can pay per request in stablecoins without accounts, API keys, or a checkout page. Its open standards enable machine-to-machine commerce without traditional intermediaries.