Cardano activated the Van Rossem hard fork on July 18 and reached protocol version 11 without any downtime.
It is the first major upgrade of the network that is fully empowered through on-chain community management, without a centralized company leading the process.
The fork reduces the execution costs of Plutus smart contracts and bundles five technical improvements, including new cryptographic tools and a security solution that requires each stake pool to use a unique cryptographic key.
Cardano has been working hard by implementing the Van Rossem upgrade this weekend and transitioning the network to protocol version 11.
It’s not the first time Cardano has executed a hard fork, but it is happening is the first time this has happened without the involvement of the blockchain development company, Input Output. That makes how it happened at least as important as what the upgrade does.
A hard fork – a permanent, mandatory update to a blockchain’s core rules, applied simultaneously to every computer running the network – is a pretty serious business. Throughout Cardano’s history, it has been Input Output that has decided on these types of network changes.
Paving the way for improved scalability and lower costs on the network, Van Rossem is the first major Cardano upgrade to be fully ratified through on-chain governance, meaning it was voted on live by elected community members, server operators, and an oversight committee.
The fork bears the name of Max van Rossem, a Dutch Cardano employee who passed away in October 2025. Van Rossem, as developer, elected representative, interchange operator and constitutional delegate, helped design the governance system that just activated this upgrade.
Three separate agencies have signed up. Delegated representatives known as “DReps” – community members elected to vote on behalf of Cardano holders, similar to elected deputies in a parliament – approved it at 77.63%, passing the 60% threshold. Stake pool operators – the companies and individuals who run the servers that keep Cardano running – backed it at 52.7%, just above the required 51%.
The Constitutional Commission, a seven-member board that verifies that upgrades comply with Cardano’s founding document, also approved the proposal. Cardano has been working on this governance model since the Chang hard fork in 2024, which first introduced on-chain voting, followed by the Plomin hard fork in early 2025, which gave token holders real decision-making power.
What the upgrade actually does
Van Rossem is an upgrade within an era: a targeted improvement that does not rebuild Cardano’s core structure. The main goal is to reduce Plutus’s execution costs. Plutus is Cardano’s smart contract programming language: the code engine behind every DeFi app, NFT marketplace, and on-chain payment tool built on the network.
Cheaper execution means developers can run more complex apps for less.
The upgrade bundles several technical proposals, including new cryptographic tools to more quickly verify digital signatures and a security solution that requires each stake pool to use a unique cryptographic key, closing a known attack path.
What changes for builders now that Van Rossem is live?
Protocol version 11 adds constant-time array indexing, native value processing, faster list traversal, and new cryptographic primitives.
Built-in features now work in Plutus V1, V2 and V3. Transaction form remains the same. https://t.co/lpUO158oJA
Last week, Input Output (the company that built Cardano’s core codebase) announced that it would be handing development to external specialist teams starting in August. Van Rossem is the first upgrade to be carried out during that transition.
The next goal is Ouroboros Leios—Cardano’s planned overhaul of the way transactions are processed, aiming for a 30 to 65 times increase in throughput with the goal of more than 1,000 transactions per second. Van Rossem is a technical requirement.
Cardano (ADA) price: flat but not falling
As exciting as this news may be for Cardano fans, the markets don’t yet seem to think the hard fork is delivering enough hopium to move the needle.
Cardano, which trades as ADA, has been essentially flat for three days, hovering around $0.1662 on a $6 billion market cap. The bulls are pushing, but the overall weight is still bearish: the hard fork announcement appears to have stabilized prices and prevented another test of deeper support.
The 50-day exponential moving average (a trend-following line focused on recent price action) is below the 200-day mark, a classic bearish configuration. The RSI (a momentum score from 0 to 100, where above 70 indicates overbought and below 30 means oversold) is 48.8, which is considered neutral. ADX, which measures trend strength, is weak at 16.1, although the directional component has shifted from bearish to bullish – an early signal that traders are watching for possible turning points.
Whales holding between 100,000 and 100 million ADA tokens pushed their balances to the highest level since 2023, per Santiment data. Smaller containers reduced exposure.
Charlies Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, expected Leios will reach the mainnet and public testnet (called Musashi Dojo) before the end of 2026 launched June 23.
