Cardano is further handing over core engineering development to community and external teams. Input Output indicates that from August onwards, the Haskell node, the Plutus Smart Contract Platform, the Daedalus wallet and the Hydra amplification tool will continue to be taken over by professional companies and the full transition is expected to continue until 2027.
As this arrangement is launched, Cardano is about to embark on a new upgrade of the main network. July 18, 21:44 UTC, Van Rossem hard fork will enter into force, bring the network to protocol version 11 and introduce a new Plutus built-in function to reduce the implementation costs of smart contracts.
The team is clear.
Input Output mentions that the institutions involved include Se7en Labs and Terragone. The former has an infrastructure development background in Solana, while the latter is a password research team that currently leads the development of the Mitril signature protocol in Cardano.
Under the new arrangement, there will be at least three separate nodes for parallel advancement based on Haskell, Rust and Go. The work will be monitored by the community bodies Intersect and Pragma.
Voltaire phase continues.
The Cardano founder saw this transfer as the end of the Voltaire phase. This phase has focused mainly on governance and de-centreization, and Cardano has been advancing its objectives since 2024.
Input Output states that the Cardano agreement and governance structure have been decentralised and that the development of the project will now move further towards decentralization. The company’s follow-up will focus more on research and new projects such as IO Labs and IO Ventures.
Upgrading occurs in tandem with market reactions
Van Rossem had been supported by 77.63 per cent of community representatives on 13 July. Once the upgrade is completed, Cardano will be in protocol version 11, one of the main points being to lower the implementation costs of smart contracts on the chain.
On the market side, ADA rose by about 2 per cent that day, reported $0.165 and had a market value of about $6 billion. Derivative data show that the pending ADA futures contract is about $193 million, with a gap ratio of about 2.84, indicating that the current market position is still multisided.
However, according to the data, the ADA price is still about 95 per cent below its historical highs in 2021. This means that, while the project governance and development structure continues to adjust, the market ' s judgement of its long-term performance is yet to be followed by upgrading and ecological performance validation.