Overview
- Cardano moved its mainnet to Protocol Version 11 after the van Rossem hard fork took effect at the epoch boundary on Saturday, July 18.
- The upgrade is the first hard fork fully ratified through Voltaire onchain governance, with delegated representatives, stake pool operators and the Constitutional Committee approving the change.
- Five Cardano Improvement Proposals (CIP-0109, CIP-0132, CIP-0133, CIP-0138, CIP-0153) add built-in cryptographic functions, an Array type, a native Value type, multi-scalar multiplication and modular exponentiation to Plutus and unify built-ins across Plutus V1–V3 to reduce execution costs.
- Ledger-level rules were tightened to enforce VRF key-hash uniqueness, move some Constitutional Committee voting checks into ledger validation, and revise Plutus reference input handling to reduce attack vectors and improve governance enforcement.
- The van Rossem changes follow Preview and Preprod testing and are framed as groundwork for the Dijkstra-era upgrade and Ouroboros Leios scaling work, which remains under development with no mainnet date announced.