Cardano Welcomes New Smart Contract Release Ahead of Intra-Era Hard Fork

Plutus, the native smart contract language for Cardano, has welcomed a new release as the network prepares for its intra-era hard fork.

According to Cardano updates, an X handle dedicated to Cardano releases and updates, a new version of Plutus, 1.58.0.0, has been released.

This follows efforts by Cardano’s core technology teams to expand Plutus built-in functionality scheduled for activation in protocol version 11 alongside stability improvements across networking and mempool handling.

Cardano’s next protocol upgrade is an intra-era hard fork to protocol version 11, introducing targeted improvements across Plutus performance, ledger consistency and node-level security. All these will occur without changing transaction shape or transitioning to a new ledger era.

This week, node v.10.6.2 was released in preparation for the intra-era hard fork. Additionally, foundational work was added to support the upcoming intra-era hard fork (protocol version 11) and the future Dijkstra era (protocol version 12), preparing the node for the next phase of protocol evolution.

Cardano hard fork update

Cardano’s intra-era hard fork to protocol 11 has been officially confirmed as van Rossem hard fork, Intersect stated this in a Feb. 19 update.

Over the past week, the hard fork naming info action ended voting with final tallies putting the DRep support at over 80% of all active DRep stake. This represents overwhelming support, officially confirming the protocol version 11 hard fork as the van Rossem hard fork.

Cardano node version 10.6.2 was released this week (promoted from the 10.6.2 pre-release containing hard fork functionality, which can be tested on SanchoNet). This release contains improvements that strengthen node stability and networking.

The 10.6.2 release is not intended to be the mainnet hard fork candidate release; 10.7 will have further improvements, making it the target for the hard fork.

SanchoNet has been upgraded using the newly-released Cardano node 10.6.2 and is now running protocol version 11. There is also an accompanying DB-Sync pre-release available, which supports hard forking to protocol version 11.

The Cardano node 10.7.0 release is targeted for within the next two weeks. This node release will be used for fork preview, preprod and then the Cardano mainnet.