Cardano is preparing for an intra-era hard fork to Protocol Version 11, which enhances Plutus performance, ledger consistency and node security.
Named Van Rossem hard fork, the upgrade avoids an era transition to minimize integration burdens while introducing enhanced primitives, VRF key uniqueness and updated reference input rules.
This update is projected to take place in late June 2026, with steady progress made in preparation and ecosystem readiness.
Intersect, a member-based organization in the Cardano ecosystem, shares the latest update on the hard fork process.
10.7.0 release faces setback
The benchmarking of the 10.7.0 pre-release identified a significant memory regression, with around 6 GB of additional RAM usage appearing over a 15-day period. Benchmarking ensures that new node versions are stable, performant and ready to support the network under realistic conditions before they move closer to mainnet readiness.
The cause of issue is believed to have been identified by Cardano’s performance and testing teams, and a local fix has already been implemented. Integration benchmarking with the performance team is planned over the next few days to confirm whether the issue is resolved without requiring any downstream API changes.
Consequently, the 10.7.0 version will not be promoted to a mainnet-ready release but instead, the fixes are expected to be included in a 10.7.1 release, alongside a fix for a separate consensus issue that has been causing occasional failures.
While it is a meaningful issue, the positivity is that it was identified early. Intersect indicated that the projected late June 2026 enactment date remains unchanged. If the 10.7.1 release can sail through without API changes, there is still enough flexibility in the timeline to absorb the delay.
Cardano expands analytics dashboards
At April’s start, Intersect announced that Cardano’s on-chain data is now available on blockchain analytics platform Dune. Remarkable progress has been reported since the initial news of the integration emerged.
Intersect noted that since launch, community members have been building dedicated Cardano dashboards. Meanwhile, the Pentad team has been busy improving the Cardano Ecosystem Overview Dashboard, and an initial Cardano Governance Health Dashboard was also created.
