Cardano has entered epoch 666, a scheduling milestone that attracted attention mainly because of its biblical associations rather than any technical significance. Cardano has used five-day epochs since its launch in September 2017, with each epoch containing 432,000 one-second slots. According to Cexplorer, epoch 666 began on Nov. 5, 2026, and was expected to close on Nov. 10.
Despite community interest, the network emphasized that the milestone is symbolic, with no hard fork or major protocol upgrade tied to the epoch and no action required from node or stake pool operators.
Separately, Cexplorer data showed Cardano has processed more than 127 million mainnet transactions, putting the total at 127,203,164. The figure reflects long-term accumulated usage rather than a sudden spike.
On the upgrade front, DijkstraNet, the testnet for the Dijkstra hard fork, has been hard forked to protocol version 12 and is available for testing against the full Dijkstra feature set, except for Linear Leios. Node 11.2 was pre-released on Oct. 28 and used to move DijkstraNet into the Dijkstra era, while DB Sync 13.8.0.0 was released for all networks.
Midnight completed its upgrade from Ledger 8 to Ledger 9, adding support for the ECDSA digital signature standard and Keccak-256 hashing algorithm used by Bitcoin and Ethereum. The upgrade expands wallet and custody compatibility and enables contracts to interact directly with one another.
