Cardano is preparing for its Protocol 11 hard fork scheduled for April 2026, backed by 680 weekly development commits across 80 repositories. The upgrade will deliver performance improvements for Plutus smart contracts, add new cryptographic capabilities, and introduce tighter ledger rules without breaking existing contracts. The Hard Fork Working Group has proposed naming it the van Rossem Hard Fork in honor of Max van Rossem.
Input Output Engineering is preparing two key node releases: Cardano node 10.6.2 as a pre-release version and node 10.7.0 as the hard fork-ready candidate. The upgrade will not alter transaction formats, minimizing ecosystem upgrade efforts. Despite the technical improvements, ADA continues trading around $0.26, down 91.5% from its all-time high.
