Cardano

Cardano began in 2015 when Charles Hoskinson founded IOHK, launching its mainnet in 2017 with a three-entity split among IOHK, the Cardano Foundation and Emurgo, and peer-reviewed research plus Ouroboros as its differentiators.

The Alonzo hard fork brought smart contracts in September 2021 and Vasil improved throughput and Plutus costs in 2022, yet DeFi TVL stayed in the hundreds of millions and never reached the top tier.

The Chang hard fork in September 2024 activated CIP-1694, handing governance to DReps, SPOs and a constitutional committee, with a constitutional convention in Buenos Aires that December; Plomin completed the handover in January 2025.

On June 23, 2026 the Leios public testnet "Musashi Dojo" went live, using pipelined blocks to target 10x to 65x throughput, and Node 9.0.0 shipped on July 6 requiring operators to upgrade for the next hard fork.

IOG requested 27.7 million ADA from the treasury, released against milestones with independent oversight, to bring Leios to a mainnet release candidate targeted for December 2026; Hoskinson claims three-to-five-second settlement and 1,500 transactions per second.

On June 22 the SecondFi wallet service was exploited, draining about 16 million ADA from 374 addresses, and EMURGO said it would never reopen and assembled a recovery team, hitting trust again.

ADA fell about 41% in 2026 to near $0.20 for a market cap of roughly $5.8 billion, 94% below its 2021 peak, with no spot ETF; Hoskinson's June proposals for a governance Discord, DRep bloc and new constitution, with the Midnight privacy sidechain as the commercial hook, drew little market response.

On July 18, 2026, Cardano enacted the van Rossem hard fork, moving mainnet to protocol version 11 — the first upgrade ratified entirely through on-chain governance (CIP-1694), with 77.6% DRep support. The upgrade expanded Plutus builtins and lowered smart-contract costs.

On governance, in September 2026 DReps voted 64.33% against a 12.29-million-ADA treasury allocation for IOG's Pogun Bitcoin DeFi project, after which Hoskinson said IOG will no longer default to Cardano as its launch network. The Dijkstra hard fork is confirmed for a two-phase rollout, with phase one (Linear Leios) targeted for late 2026; the Rust node Amaru aims to produce blocks on mainnet by November 2026. A second Constitutional Committee election was also completed, and the Constitutional Amendment Portal entered alpha testing.

On July 18, 2026 the Van Rossem hard fork moved Cardano to protocol version 11, the first hard fork proposed, debated and ratified entirely through on-chain governance, with 77.63% of DRep votes, 52.7% of stake pool operator votes and six constitutional committee approvals, all above threshold. A second constitutional committee election followed in September, with four seats ratified in epoch 653 and taking office in epoch 654.

The Leios public testnet, Musashi Dojo, launched on June 23, and July brought two prototype builds plus an endorser block observability dashboard. Intersect's 25.4 million ADA treasury withdrawal was ratified for technical stewardship and governance coordination. The constitutional amendment portal entered alpha in August, the $80 million Orion Fund with Draper Dragon was set up to drive real-world assets and bitcoin liquidity, and both the Midnight mainnet and the Cardano-Injective IBC connection went live during the year.

Cardano's Dijkstra runs in two phases. Phase 1 targets code completion in Q4 2026 and mainnet delivery by the end of the year, raising the protocol version to 12 and activating Linear Leios (CIP-164) and nested transactions (CIP-118), while installing the codec extensions and parameters Peras will need. Phase 2 is an intra-era hard fork in Q2 2027 switching on Ouroboros Peras (CIP-140), letting stake pool committees vote to compress settlement to about two minutes, subject to a separate governance vote. Input Output also plans a narrow constitutional amendment to bring those parameters inside the guardrails, and Amaru, the Rust node, targets mainnet block production in November 2026.

Charles Hoskinson is chief executive and co-founder of Input Output. He studied mathematics and cryptography, co-founded Ethereum in 2013 and left in 2014, and co-founded IOHK in 2015 where he now drives research.

Frederik Gregaard is chief executive of the Cardano Foundation, with a bachelor's in business and finance and a master's in innovation management from Copenhagen Business School. He has run the Foundation since 2020.

Phillip Pon is chief executive of EMURGO. He started in fintech and payments management and has long pushed blockchain commercialisation, joining the community governance migration in 2026.

Jeremy Wood, a co-founder of Input Output who has left, holds a BA in English literature and taught English in Osaka. He joined Ethereum in 2013, co-founded IOHK in 2015 as chief strategy officer and stepped down in 2020.

Gerard Moroney is chief operating officer of Input Output and chair of the Intersect board. He began in engineering and operations management and in 2026 coordinates the budget process and the Dijkstra hard fork.