Cardano activated the Van Rossem hard fork on mainnet at 21:44:51 UTC on July 18, moving the network to Protocol Version 11 and unlocking new Plutus primitives for cryptography, data access a
Cardano activated the Van Rossem hard fork on mainnet at 21:44:51 UTC on July 18, moving the network to Protocol Version 11 and unlocking new Plutus primitives for cryptography, data access and multi-asset smart contracts.
The intra-era upgrade kept Cardano in the Conway era while changing the protocol rules used by nodes and Plutus scripts. It followed deployments on the Preview and Preprod test networks and required support from delegated representatives, stake pool operators and the Constitutional Committee.
The hard fork initiation action was ratified on July 13 with 77.63% DRep support, 52.7% SPO support and six Constitutional Committee members voting that it was constitutional. A separate Plutus cost-model update took effect on June 18, assigning execution prices to the new operations before Protocol Version 11 went live.
Van Rossem adds five main Plutus capabilities. Modular exponentiation moves a costly cryptographic operation into a native built-in, reducing the need to calculate inverses offchain and place additional data inside transactions. Multi-scalar multiplication over BLS12-381 lowers the computational burden for zero-knowledge proofs, signature aggregation and other elliptic-curve workloads.
The upgrade also introduces dropList, designed to reduce the cost of accessing elements deeper inside lists, and a native Array type with constant-time lookup. MaryEraValue gives Plutus first-class tools for handling Cardano’s multi-asset values instead of repeatedly processing nested map structures.
Protocol Version 11 also makes newer built-ins available across Plutus V1, V2 and V3, reducing the need to recompile older contracts solely to access later primitives. The savings are operation-specific rather than a blanket reduction in every Cardano transaction fee. Contracts using cryptographic verification, large collections or complex native-token logic can consume fewer execution units when they use the new built-ins.
Van Rossem was approved through the governance system introduced during Cardano’s Voltaire rollout. DReps, SPOs and the Constitutional Committee held separate roles in the protocol vote, extending a governance push that included the Cardano Foundation’s delegation of 220 million ADA to 11 DReps in January.
The upgrade follows the addition of 14,783 non-empty ADA wallets from Cardano’s June 23 holder-count bottom into early July. ADA traded near $0.166 on Sunday, inside an intraday range of roughly $0.164 to $0.168 after the mainnet transition.
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