Public chain Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson announced on Sunday, 9th, on the community platform that it is expected to undergo the Chang hard fork upgrade in June, which will also bring Cardano into the final stage of its roadmap, “Voltaire.”
What is a hard fork?
Five stages of Cardano’s roadmap
ADA dropped by 1.9% in the past 24 hours
Veteran public chain Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson announced last Sunday on the community platform X
that Cardano Node may reach version 9.0 this month, which means Cardano is ready to undergo the Chang hard fork upgrade, and is now waiting for 70% of stake pool operators (SPO) to install new nodes.
It is worth mentioning that after this hard fork, Cardano will enter the final stage of its roadmap, “Voltaire.”
This Cardano hard fork upgrade, also known as the “Chang fork upgrade,” is in memory of Cardano’s early leader, Phil Chang, who passed away in 2022.
A hard fork is a way to update blockchain technology that creates a new chain that is incompatible with the original blockchain. In simple terms, a hard fork is like a major upgrade to a blockchain system, which will make the new system and the old system unable to communicate with each other.
For example, Bitcoin experienced a hard fork in 2017 due to scalability disputes, resulting in the creation of Bitcoin Cash (BCH). Ethereum completed “The Merge” upgrade in September 2022, transitioning Ethereum’s consensus mechanism from Proof of Work (PoW) to Proof of Stake (PoS) through a hard fork that merged the beacon chain and the mainnet.
According to official information, Cardano’s roadmap consists of five major development stages, also known as “eras,” named after famous figures in the arts and sciences, namely “Byron,” “Shelley,” “Goguen,” “Basho,” and “Voltaire.”
The first three stages achieve basic blockchain, decentralization, and smart contracts, while the Basho era focuses on expanding the blockchain. The final Voltaire era is to add governance, voting, and financial management functions to Cardano.
Additionally, Hoskinson stated that this hard fork will be the most important milestone in Cardano’s history.
Due to the recent downward trend in the cryptocurrency market, the positive news of the Chang hard fork upgrade does not seem to be reflected in the price of Cardano’s native token ADA, which was reported at $0.433 before the deadline, a 1.9% drop in the past 24 hours and a 5.8% drop in the past week. It remains to be seen whether the price of ADA will increase as the upgrade news unfolds, and it is worth our continued attention.