Cardano Drops 2026 Hard Fork Update: What to Expect?

In a recent X post, Intersect, a member-based organization for the Cardano ecosystem has shared a fresh update on Cardano’s incoming upgrade, Protocol version 11.

According to Intersect, Cardano’s intra-era hard fork to Protocol version 11 marks a small intra-era upgrade that will not impact transaction shape, hence minimizing ecosystem upgrade effort. 

The Protocol 11 upgrade primarily delivers performance boosts for Plutus, adding new cryptographic capabilities through built-ins and cleaner ledger rules, without breaking existing contracts.

A hard fork is needed to implement several improvements to the Cardano Haskell node. In this light, the proposed upgrade of an intra-era hard fork to Protocol version 11 introduces a small set of improvements across security, governance and Plutus capability. 

As reported, Intersect’s Hard Fork Working Group put forward a proposal earlier in January to name the Cardano Protocol version 11 upgrade, the van Rossem Hard Fork, in honor of Max van Rossem.

Node releases coming

Intersect highlights being in the first stages of the upgrade process, currently focused on socialization and planning.

It noted that following discussions with the hard fork working group, the Input Output Engineering (IOE) teams are teasing two releases of the Cardano node.

The first is the Pre-Release Cardano node 10.6.2, with a target release within one week. This pre-release node contains the hard fork functionality and aims to get the hard fork features into the community’s hands as soon as possible for SanchoNet testing.

The second is Cardano node 10.7.0, with a target release date within three weeks. This represents the mainnet hard fork-ready candidate release and will be used to fork the Preview and PreProd environments, and then mainnet. Finally, formal benchmarking and performance tests will be run.

The Cardano node 10.6.2 release aims to get the ball rolling and engage stakeholders before a hard fork candidate node is prepared. Meanwhile, 10.7.0 is marked as a candidate, as it will be capable of the hard fork but dependent on successful testnet deployments and formal benchmarking.