Cardano upgraded its mainnet to Protocol Version 11 on July 18 at 21:44 UTC, completing a hard fork called Van Rossem after the governance action was ratified on July 13. The transition involved only a brief ten-minute block gap with no disruption to user funds or holdings.

The upgrade itself is significant. What it represents for how Cardano now operates is more significant still. For the first time in the network's history, a major hard fork was proposed, debated, and ratified entirely through Cardano's on-chain Voltaire governance system, without direction from Input Output, the engineering firm that designed and built the blockchain. Every previous Cardano upgrade had been coordinated top-down by the network's founding entities.

On-chain data from Cardanoscan shows the network moved from protocol version 10 in epoch 643 to version 11 in epoch 644 after ratification from three separate governance bodies.

How three governance bodies voted and what the margins revealed

Delegated representatives, known as DReps, are community members elected to vote on governance proposals on behalf of ADA holders. They approved the Van Rossem upgrade at 78.97%, well above the required 60% threshold. The Constitutional Committee, a seven-member body that evaluates whether a proposal complies with the Cardano Constitution rather than its technical merits, found the hard fork compliant. All seven members agreed, where five were required.

Stake pool operators, the companies and individuals whose servers keep Cardano running, approved the upgrade at 53.02%. That margin, the narrowest of the three, carries a pointed implication. Decentralized governance means the founders' preferred outcome is no longer guaranteed.

Cardano's constitution also required at least 85% of stake pools by active stake to run compatible node software before ratification. Network telemetry showed roughly 93% of block production already on version 11 before activation, well ahead of that threshold.

"The best part: it was ratified on-chain by delegated community reps before activation. Upgrades by governance, not decree," Cardano DRep Jason Appleton wrote on X.

What Protocol Version 11 actually changes in the code

Van Rossem is an intra-era hard fork. It stays within the Conway governance era and does not alter the structure of transactions, which means ecosystem upgrade effort is minimal for applications already deployed on the network.

The upgrade's primary focus is Plutus, Cardano's smart contract execution platform. New primitives arrive through five improvement proposals. CIP-0109 adds modular exponentiation on-chain, removing the need to offload operations such as multiplicative inverses to off-chain processes. CIP-0132 introduces a dropList built-in that directly drops list elements, addressing a throughput bottleneck for decentralized applications. CIP-0133 exposes multi-scalar multiplication functions over BLS12-381 from the blst library, enabling efficient on-chain verification of pairing-based zero-knowledge proofs. CIP-0138 adds a polymorphic Array type with constant-time indexing, unlocking a broad class of algorithms previously impractical in Plutus. CIP-0153 introduces a native Value type for handling multi-asset maps, replacing slower generic Map operations.

Beyond the new primitives, the upgrade unifies built-in functions across Plutus V1, V2, and V3. Previously, each language version exposed its own subset of built-ins, so newer functionality was only accessible by recompiling contracts to the latest version. After Van Rossem, all built-ins are available across all three versions, meaning older V1 and V2 contracts gain new capabilities without recompilation.

The upgrade also adds native case expressions over built-in types Bool, Integer, and Data to Untyped Plutus Core. Before this change, branching on Data structure required chained if-then patterns that were expensive at runtime. Direct dispatch on the relevant tag yields significant performance gains and simpler script logic.

On the security side, VRF key hash uniqueness is now enforced at the ledger level. No two stake pools can register or operate with the same VRF key. The Constitutional Committee voting restriction has been promoted from a mempool-only check to a proper ledger predicate, meaning an offending vote now causes a deterministic on-chain failure rather than one that depends on submission path.

Input Output wrote in a development report that "as well as Plutus improvements and Plutus Cost Model enhancements, this upgrade lays the foundation for the next upgrade, the Dijkstra era hard fork, which will introduce Ouroboros Leios to Cardano."

ADA price and what market data shows after the upgrade

ADA traded near $0.1663 at the time of activation, up roughly 1.2% over 24 hours, according to HodlFM market data. The price has not yet produced a sustained rally. Technically, the 50-week exponential moving average sits below the 200-week, a bearish configuration. The RSI read approximately 34 at one point, with the Average Directional Index signaling a strong downtrend.

Whale accumulation tells a different story on-chain. Wallets holding between 100,000 and 100 million ADA now control more than 25.6 billion tokens, the highest level since February 2023, according to Santiment. Smaller retail wallets holding fewer than 100 ADA reduced their holdings by roughly 0.7% over the past four months.

ADA futures open interest stood at approximately $193 million with a 2.84 long-to-short ratio, suggesting most futures traders are positioned for a price rebound despite the weak technical picture.

The person the upgrade is named for

The hard fork carries the name of Max van Rossem, a Dutch Cardano contributor who died in October 2025. Van Rossem co-founded AmsterdamNode, organized the Cardano Summit in the Netherlands four consecutive years from 2021 through 2024, served as a member and co-lead of the Constitutional Committee Election Working Group at Intersect, represented the Dutch community as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Buenos Aires, and was a driving force behind the inclusion of Article VIII in the Cardano Constitution.

On January 11, 2026, after his passing, his son Max Louis Hans van Rossem was born.

Input Output announced it will hand over core infrastructure including the Plutus platform and Daedalus wallet to external specialist firms from August. Van Rossem is the first upgrade executed under that governance transition. Ouroboros Leios, the scalability overhaul targeting 30 to 65 times current throughput, is the next planned major upgrade. Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has said he expects Leios to reach mainnet before the end of 2026. Its public testnet launched June 23.

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