Cardano's Protocol 11 hard fork is targeting an April 2026 deployment, backed by 680 weekly commits across 80 repositories making it one of the most actively developed blockchain networks. The upgrade brings throughput and smart contract improvements while ADA trades at $0.26, down 91.5% from its all-time high. The network recently deployed its first ZK smart contract using Halo-2-zkSNARK, and the Midnight privacy sidechain launched this weekend with Google and MoneyGram among its validators. Input Output Engineering is preparing two node releases tied to Protocol 11, with the first being Cardano node 10.6.2 expected within one week, followed by node 10.7.0 as the mainnet hard fork-ready candidate.