Cardano has reached a significant milestone with the submission of the van Rossem hard fork initiation governance action on its mainnet on June 16, 2026. This intra-era hard fork introduces new features and serves as a critical stepping stone toward the next major era, Dijkstra, which will ultimately bring the Leios scaling solution to the Cardano network.
The governance action submission followed months of rigorous testing and coordination across Cardano's Preview and Preprod test networks. The process involved a Plutus Cost Model (PCM) parameter update and the hard fork initiation action. The PCM update was enacted on the Preview network on May 8, after a prior update and the release of Cardano-node-11.0.1 and db-sync-13.7.0.5, and on the Preprod network on May 16. The same update was submitted to mainnet on May 26, ratified by DReps and Constitutional Committee members on June 13, and scheduled for enactment on June 18 at 21:45 UTC.
The van Rossem hard fork governance action is now live for review, with potential ratification dates ranging from June 23 to July 18, 2026. If ratified quickly, the hard fork could be enacted as early as June 28, with other possible dates extending to July 23. The action expires on July 18, giving delegates and the Constitutional Committee a limited window to complete the process.
The hard fork is named after Max van Rossem, a beloved Cardano community member, developer, stake pool operator, DRep, and Constitutional Convention delegate who passed away in October 2025. The naming governance action received 83.62% DRep support and 4.44 billion ADA backing. Intersect, the organization coordinating the upgrade, emphasized that van Rossem "asked hard questions," "built," and "showed up."
Unlike an era change, the van Rossem fork is an intra-era upgrade, minimizing disruption for wallets, exchanges, stake pool operators, and dApps. It lays the foundation for the Dijkstra era, which is expected to prepare the network for Leios—a design aimed at higher throughput. The upgrade also improves Plutus performance, ledger consistency, and node-level security, as previously noted in updates to Cardano's Lace wallet.
