Cardano Hard Fork Upgrade Nears With Critical Node Release Anticipated

Cardano continues to prepare for its intra-era hard fork to Protocol 11 (van Rossem hard fork), with a critical node release now anticipated.

According to a recent update by Intersect, a member-based organization within the Cardano ecosystem, Cardano Node 10.7.0 Target prerelease is expected within a few days. Cardano Node 10.7.0 is one of the two node releases highlighted as necessary for the van Rossem hard fork.

The Cardano node 10.6.2 was released in February as the network kicked off preparations for the hard fork. The release of Cardano node 10.7.0 is expected to be the starting point for ecosystem upgrades, being a major Cardano node release containing new features beyond the hard fork capabilities.

Once released, the Cardano ecosystem is expected to integrate this node into their tooling. This integration and ecosystem testing is key for any major version release.

Dependent on performance results and integration testing, further minor releases may follow.

Likewise, DBSync version, which is compatible with node version 10.7.0, is expected soon after its release. No serialization changes are included in this upgrade, so no issues with hardware wallets are anticipated. Prerelease version 10.7.0 can be used for testing features.

Version 10.7.x will be promoted to version 11 to fork the Preview and PreProd testnets and subsequently mainnet.

Protocol version 11 introduces new Plutus built-in functions

The Cardano hard fork to protocol 11 will introduce new plutus built-ins which are: CIP-138 | Array type; CIP-153 | MaryEraValue type; CIP-109 | Modular exponentiation builtin; CIP-132 | dropList builtin and CIP-133 | Multi-scalar multiplication over BLS12-381.

Intersect noted that these new built-ins are available for testing as SanchoNet has been upgraded to protocol version 11. Scalus’s smart contract tooling has also been upgraded ahead of the hard fork to allow these built-ins to be used.

The hard fork to protocol version 11, named van Rossem, is a small intra-era upgrade and does not affect transaction shape, hence minimizing ecosystem upgrade effort.

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