Cardano welcomes new smart contract release ahead of intra-era hard fork

Plutus, Cardano’s native smart contract language, welcomed the new release as the network prepares for an intra-era hard fork.

According to Cardano Updates, a new version 1.58.0.0 of Plutus, an X handle dedicated to Cardano releases and updates, has been released.

This follows efforts by Cardano’s core technology team to extend Plutus built-in features that will be enabled in protocol version 11, along with improved stability across network and memory pool operations.

Cardano’s next protocol upgrade is an intra-era hard fork to protocol version 11, which introduces targeted improvements across Plutus performance, ledger consistency, and node-level security. All of this happens without changing the form of transactions or moving into a new ledger era.

This week, node v.10.6.2 was released in preparation for an intra-era hard fork. In addition, groundwork was added to support future intra-era hard forks (protocol version 11) and future Dijkstra eras (protocol version 12), preparing nodes for the next stage of protocol evolution.

Cardano hard fork update

Cardano’s intra-era hard fork to Protocol 11 was officially confirmed as the van Rossem hard fork, and Intersect stated this in an update on February 19th.

Last week, the hard fork naming information action ended voting, with the final tally showing support for DRep by over 80% of all active DRep shares. This has been overwhelmingly popular and officially confirms that the protocol version 11 hard fork is a van Rossem hard fork.

Cardano node version 10.6.2 was released this week (promoted from the 10.6.2 pre-release, which included hard fork features that you can test on SanchoNet). This release includes improvements to enhance node stability and networking.

The 10.6.2 release is not intended to be a mainnet hard fork candidate release. 10.7 will have further improvements and will be subject to a hard fork.

SanchoNet has been upgraded with the newly released Cardano node 10.6.2 and is currently running protocol version 11. A companion DB-Sync pre-release is also available that supports hard forks to protocol version 11.

Cardano node 10.7.0 is expected to be released within the next two weeks. This node release will be used for fork preview, preprod, and Cardano mainnet.