In short
- Cardano launched the Van Rossem hard fork on July 18, reaching protocol version 11 with zero downtime.
- It’s the first major network upgrade to be approved entirely through community-based governance, without a central company controlling it.
- The fork lowers the cost of the Plutus smart contract and rebuilds five updates, including new cryptographic tools and security fixes that require each pool to use a unique cryptographic key.
Cardano has been hard at work, implementing the Van Rossem update over the weekend and switching the network to protocol 11.
This isn’t the first time Cardano has done a hard fork—but and the first time that happened without the intervention of the blockchain startup company, Input Output. This makes how it’s done just as important as how the upgrade does.
A hard fork – a permanent, legally binding change to the blockchain’s rules, which is applied simultaneously to all computers running the Internet – is extremely difficult. Throughout Cardano’s history, it has been the Issuer of choice for these types of internet changes.
Van Rossem, which establishes a way to improve scalability and lower costs in the network, is the first Cardano upgrade to be fully approved through the chain’s authority, which means that elected members of the community, server operators, and the management committee have voted.
This fork is named after Max van Rossem, a Dutch Cardano developer who died in October 2025. A developer, elected representative, node operator, and legislative representative, Van Rossem helped create the governance structure that has just led to this upgrade.
Three separate organizations were signed. Representative representatives known as “DReps” -community members elected to vote on behalf of Cardano owners, similar to elected representatives in the parliament – approved at 77.63%, minus 60 percent. Stake pool users – companies and individuals running the servers that keep Cardano running – contributed at 52.7%, above the 51% required.
The Regulatory Committee, a seven-member body that ensures that upgrades comply with Cardano’s charter, also approved the proposal. Cardano has been building on a leadership model since the beginning Switch to hard fork in 2024which introduced on-chain voting, then with Plomin hard fork in early 2025which gave token owners real decision-making power.
What the upgrade does
Van Rossem is an intra-era upgrade that does not rebuild the Cardano core. His main goal is to reduce the cost of Plutus. Plutus is Cardano’s smart contract programming language—the one behind every DeFi app, NFT market, and on-chain payment tool built on the network.
Low cost performance means developers can run more complex software at a lower cost.
The upgrade contains a variety of technical concepts, including new encryption tools for faster digital signature verification and security improvements that require each party to use a unique cryptographic key—blocking a known attack method.
Now that van Rossem is alive, what changes for the builders?
Protocol Version 11 adds regular sorting, native Tree management, faster list execution, and new cryptographic basics.
The builds are now working across Plutus V1, V2, and V3. The business model remains the same. https://t.co/lpUO158oJA
– The Output Group (@IOGroup) July 20, 2026
For everyday users, nothing changes today.
Last week, Input Output (the company that developed the Cardano codebase) announced that it would end development for foreign special teams starting in August. Van Rossem was the first promotion to take place under the reform.
The next goal is Ouroboros Leos-Cardano has planned to improve its performance, tracking 30 to 65 times the current transaction with a goal of more than 1,000 transactions per second. Van Rossem is important for technology.
Cardano (ADA) price: Flat but not falling
While this news may be interesting to Cardano fans, the markets don’t seem to think that the hard fork provides enough hopium to move the needle just yet.
Cardano, which trades as ADA, has been flat for three days, hovering around the $0.1662 mark on a market cap of $6 billion. The bulls are pushing, but the weight is still there – the announcement of a hard fork seems to have fixed prices and prevented a retest of deep support.
The 50-day moving average (the trend line weighted by recent prices) is below the 200-day, a classic bearish configuration. RSI – a quick index from 0 to 100, where signals above 70 are overbought and below 30 means oversold – reads 48.8, which is considered neutral. ADX, which measures the strength of the trend, is at 16.1, weak, although its sector has changed from bearish to bullish – early traders look for changes.
Whales with ADA tokens between 100,000 and 100 million have peaked since 2023. Sentiment data. Small holders reduce exposure.
Charlies Hoskinson, founder of Cardano, he hopes Leios to reach the mainnet by the end of 2026, with a public testnet (called Musashi Dojo) he started June 23.
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