Cardano climbs 7% weekly after Van Rossem hard fork goes live

Cardano rose 7% to $0.1690 over the past week after activating the Van Rossem hard fork, the network's first upgrade ratified entirely through on-chain governance.

"The Van Rossem upgrade is the final push of the Voltaire era, and our partners are ready," Charles Hoskinson, Cardano's founder, said in the announcement.

The hard fork, which went live July 18 at 21:44 UTC, transitions Cardano to Protocol Version 11 and introduces new Plutus built-in functions designed to cut smart contract execution costs. Delegated representatives approved the upgrade at 77.63%, with stake pool operators backing it at 52.7% and the Constitutional Committee also signing off. The upgrade bundles five technical proposals, including new cryptographic tools and a security fix requiring every stake pool to use a unique cryptographic key.

The fork also lays the groundwork for Ouroboros Leios, a scalability upgrade targeting 30 to 65 times current throughput that Hoskinson expects on mainnet before the end of 2026. Input Output, which built Cardano's core codebase, announced it will hand off development to outside firms including Se7en Labs and Teragone starting in August, with the transition running through 2027.

ADA traded at $0.1690 as of 14:00 UTC on July 20, with a market capitalization of $6.3 billion and a 24-hour trading volume of $353 million, per CoinGecko. The token remains 94.5% below its all-time high of $3.09 from September 2021. Over the past year, ADA has lost 80.7% of its value.

Whales holding between 100,000 and 100 million ADA tokens pushed their balances to the highest level since 2023, according to Santiment data, even as smaller holders reduced exposure. The Relative Strength Index sits at 48.8, neutral territory, while the 50-day exponential moving average remains below the 200-day — a bearish configuration that has kept many traders cautious.

For Input Output, the handover closes a chapter. The company will shift focus to research and new ventures through IO Labs and IO Ventures, leaving the community to prove whether a decentralized engineering model can move faster than the one it is replacing. The new motto of the blockchain is "Built by many, owned by all."

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.