Cardano has moved the van Rossem hard fork into its next on-chain phase after a formal governance action was submitted to mainnet. The published schedule sets June 23 as the earliest possible approval date and June 28 as the earliest possible activation date. If the process takes longer, approval could slip to July 18 and go-live could move to July 23.
Technical sign-off cleared the proposal for governance
The submission followed a pair of technical checkpoints. On June 15, the Hard Fork Working Group said the Cardano mainnet was ready for the van Rossem upgrade after a full readiness review. One day later, the Technical Steering Committee confirmed that all mandatory technical conditions had been satisfied, allowing the proposal to advance.
Intersect, the membership-based organization involved in governance and coordination across the Cardano ecosystem, said the formal action to trigger the hard fork was submitted to mainnet on June 16 during epoch 637. That filing placed the upgrade proposal into the network’s governance track.
Approval and activation dates remain flexible
The governance calendar leaves room for delay. While June 23 is the earliest date the proposal can be approved, participants across the network expect the actual timing to depend on how the governance cycle progresses and how prepared ecosystem stakeholders are when the decision point arrives.
Under the current timetable, approval could come as late as July 18, with activation extending to July 23. That window gives operators and other participants more time to finish infrastructure preparations before the hard fork goes live.
Node migration to v11 continues to build
Upgrade readiness metrics are also moving higher. Data from PoolTool shows that 62% of network nodes have already upgraded to version 11.0.1, an increase of 8 percentage points from the previous week. At the same time, 81% of blocks are now being produced under Protocol Version 11, up another 5 points.
Cexplorer, which tracks hard fork preparation, reported a similar trend. Over the last five days, about 89% of block production came from v11 nodes, 4 percentage points above earlier readings. The figures point to a network that is moving quickly toward broader protocol adoption.
Lace and Hydra released new updates this week
Separate development work is also continuing across the ecosystem. Lace wallet’s new Lace Carbon version has entered internal testing, while Hydra released version 2.2.0 with the Partial Fanout feature.
According to the update, the number of UTxOs that could be held inside a Hydra head had previously been limited by the capacity of a single fanout process. Partial Fanout changes that setup by making the approach more flexible, easing the earlier constraint and improving off-chain scalability for Cardano. Hydra is Cardano’s Layer 2 scaling solution focused on increasing transaction throughput.