Cardano Activates Its First Improvement Voted Through On-Chain Governance

• The improvement was voted on by a majority of the network's validators and its constitutional committee.
• Technically, van Rossem is a hard fork, and all nodes must update mandatory.

On July 18, 2026, version 11 of the Cardano (ADA) protocol, called "van Rossem," began operating. This proposal was voted on by the constitutional committee (CC), which is responsible for verifying that protocol improvements are compatible with Cardano's constitution, and by stake pool operators (SPO), according to the network's on-chain governance model.

With it, Cardano received 5 changes to its protocol:

1. The main network protocol of Cardano will be updated to major version 11 and minor version 0. That is, it will be at version v11.0. When the major version is raised (from 10 → 11), it is a hard fork, or backward-incompatible update, meaning all nodes must update and the network begins to use new rules at the protocol level.

2. The ledger remains in the Conway era; there will be no era transition, as there was from the Byron era to Shelley, for example. Cardano divides its history into eras, each representing a significant change in the fundamental network rules.

3. Several new primitives or technological blocks will be available in Plutus, the language for creating smart contracts on Cardano. There are 5 basic operations (primitives) that are added and can be used to write contracts, giving them greater flexibility, depth, and possibly greater efficiency, although this depends on the quality of the code.

4. All built-in functions of Plutus will be consistently available across all its versions: Plutus v1, v2, and v3, expanding the capabilities of the sets of inscriptions (scripts).

5. The "case" expressions for built-in types (Bool, Integer, and Data) will be compatible with Untyped Plutus Core. This improvement makes Cardano's smart contracts faster, cheaper, and easier to program.

The proposal had been prepared during May, as reported by Criptonoticias. It was submitted on June 16 (epoch 637 of the network), ratified between July 13 and 18, and finally activated on July 18 (epoch 644).

The SPOs, who vote by placing their ADA in stake, did so as follows:

• 67.69% in favor
• 31.97% abstention
• 0.34% against

van Rossem received 6 votes in favor and 1 against in the voting of Cardano's constitutional committee. Source: Cardanocube.com

A proposal needs more than 51% of the SPO vote to be considered approved. It also needs a majority vote from the CC, which has veto power over proposals, to be considered approved. The constitutional committee, responsible for verifying that protocol improvements are compatible with Cardano's constitution, had 6 votes in favor and 1 that did not vote, obtaining a majority.

With this improvement, the Cardano community feels it is taking a significant step toward decentralizing its governance. It is not the only cryptocurrency network implementing such mechanisms: Polkadot, Tezos, and Decred are also experimenting with governance models in which validators approve or reject a technical improvement to the protocol.