Cardano has successfully activated the van Rossem hard fork, a network upgrade that reduces smart contract execution costs and lays the technical groundwork for Ouroboros Leios, a major scalability improvement expected later this year, according to Input Output Global (IOG) on Monday.
The upgrade, named after 17th-century Dutch mathematician Hendrick van Rossem, went live at epoch 504 on Sunday evening without incident. It introduces Plutus V3, the latest iteration of Cardano’s smart contract platform, which includes new cryptographic primitives and reduced execution costs for common operations.
“Plutus V3 brings BLS12-381 curve support and more efficient integer arithmetic, which together reduce typical smart contract execution costs by 20–30%,” said Kevin Hammond, technical lead for Plutus at IOG. “This is a meaningful improvement for DeFi protocols and developers building on Cardano.”
The hard fork also implements CIP-113, which adjusts the protocol’s cost model parameters to better reflect actual resource consumption. Transaction fees for typical DeFi interactions are expected to decrease by approximately 15–25%, according to IOG estimates.
Beyond immediate cost savings, van Rossem is a prerequisite for Ouroboros Leios, Cardano’s next-generation consensus protocol currently in development. Leios aims to dramatically increase throughput by enabling parallel block production and validation, targeting 1,000+ transactions per second while maintaining the chain’s security guarantees.
“Leios represents a fundamental redesign of how consensus works on Cardano,” said Duncan Coutts, IOG’s director of engineering. “van Rossem puts the necessary cryptographic and scripting primitives in place so that when Leios is ready, the transition can be smooth.”
IOG has not announced a firm launch date for Leios but indicated in its June roadmap update that a testnet release is targeted for Q4 2026, with mainnet deployment contingent on successful testing and community governance approval through the Voltaire voting system.
Cardano’s native token ADA traded at $0.42 on Monday, up 2.3% on the day. The network currently processes approximately 60,000–80,000 transactions daily across its settlement and computation layers.
The upgrade was ratified through Cardano’s on-chain governance mechanism, with stake pool operators representing over 85% of active stake signaling readiness in the epoch preceding activation. No major exchanges reported issues with deposits or withdrawals during the transition.
Source: Cointelegraph
