Cardano Enters Dijkstra Era, Here Are Major Developments

In a recent update, Intersect, a member-based organization in the Cardano ecosystem, pointed out that the last week has brought progress in protocol development, governance, community tooling, and technical delivery.

With attention turning from the van Rossem to the Dijkstra era, a new parameter update action has opened for voting, the Constitutional Committee election is on-chain, and the Constitutional Amendment Portal has opened for community alpha testing.

The van Rossem intra-era hard fork to Protocol Version 11, which brought improvements to Plutus performance, improved ledger consistency, and the security of nodes, was enacted on July 18. The hard fork laid the foundation for the next upgrade, the Dijkstra era hard fork, which will introduce Ouroboros Leios to Cardano.

With the van Rossem upgrade complete, focus has now shifted toward the Dijkstra era and the next phase of Cardano’s technical evolution.

Dijkstra preparations begin

In its update, Intersect noted that planning for the Dijkstra era has begun. This includes defining a meaningful process through which the community can help shape the scope of future hard forks beyond the initial Dijkstra release. This includes collaboration between Product Committee representatives and contributors from across the ecosystem.

The initial Dijkstra rollout is anticipated to occur across a few phases, introducing Nested Transactions, Linear Leios, and Peras, with the scope of the first hard fork expected to be finalized.

The Haskell node team’s current objective is to deliver the first two phases, Nested Transactions and Linear Leios, to mainnet by the end of 2026, allowing an incremental rollout of key Dijkstra capabilities. Any constitutional updates required for the Dijkstra era are expected to follow the hard fork’s enactment, although community discussion will start as early as practicable to permit sufficient time for feedback.

Following an earlier working group decision, the current intention is to name the next hard fork after Alexander Esgen. The group also acknowledged the existing on-chain Info action proposing that the hard fork be named after Fabian von Bergen, with community feedback now expected.