It adds new capabilities to Plutus, the platform developers use to write Cardano's smart contracts, unifying the built-in functions available across the platform's three versions so older applications gain newer features.
The upgrade also tightens several of the ledger's validation rules, including one guaranteeing that no two stake pools can reuse the same cryptographic identity key.
“As well as Plutus improvements and Plutus Cost Model enhancements, this upgrade lays the foundation for the next upgrade, the Dijkstra era hard fork, which will introduce Ouroboros Leios to Cardano,” Input Output wrote in a development report on Friday.
Ouroboros Leios is a scaling proposal for the proof-of-stake consensus model that Cardano runs. It is expected later in 2026 and aimed at sharply increasing transactions per second without weakening the protocol's security guarantees.
Van Rossem is the procedural groundwork for Ouroboros, both in the ledger changes it ships and in the precedent it sets: that Cardano can now upgrade itself by vote.
The hard fork is named for Max van Rossem, a Cardano governance contributor who helped shape the network's constitution and died in October 2025.
What the hard fork means for a Cardano user
There are no visible changes for someone casually holding or spending ADA. Transactions work the same way, wallets do not need updating and the fee to send ADA is unchanged. The upgrade does not alter how the network looks or feels to use.