Key Takeaways: Cardano's two-phase Dijkstra upgrade is moving forward with unchanged scope and target dates, setting up a year-end mainnet for Phase 1.
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Cardano Dijkstra hard fork on track as ADA holds $0.183
Intersect confirmed Aug. 15 that Cardano's Dijkstra hard fork planning remains on track, with Phase 1 targeting mainnet by year-end 2026.
"The agreed scope and target dates remain unchanged," Intersect said in its weekly update #124, adding that attention is shifting toward translating the scope into an ecosystem-wide timeline and establishing readiness reporting.
Phase 2, which introduces Peras, is scheduled for an intra-era hard fork in Q2 2027. The Haskell node team said Leios will enter a bootstrapping phase after the Dijkstra fork, requiring stake pool operators to register BLS keys. Alternative node implementation Amaru, written in Rust, is relay-capable and validating to tip, with mainnet block production targeted for November 2026.
ADA traded near $0.183 on Aug. 14, down about 2 percent after rejecting $0.19, with a $7.1 billion market cap, according to IBTimes data. Large holders accumulated more than 240 million ADA — roughly $175 million — over five days in late July and early August, lifting whale holdings to about 14.5 billion ADA, nearly 39 percent of supply.
DRep Voting at 30 Percent Against 67 Percent Threshold
The upgrade carries governance obligations. Two on-chain actions — a parameter update and the Constitutional Committee election — require DRep and SPO votes before Sept. 1, 2026. DRep voting on the committee action sits at 30.03 percent against a 67 percent threshold, while SPO voting is at 1.69 percent against 51 percent. If the committee action does not pass before existing terms expire, the Constitutional Committee falls from seven to three members, below the mandated minimum of five, stalling Cardano's governance system.
Intersect also launched the Constitutional Amendment Portal (CAP) at cap.intersectmbo.org, providing a defined path for community discussion and submission of constitutional amendments tied to the Dijkstra era. Four proposals have been submitted so far — three Constitutional Amendment Proposals and one Constitutional Issue Statement.
The Amaru team's progress is notable for node diversity, reducing Cardano's dependence on a single implementation. The team confirmed its node is relay-capable, validating and syncing to tip, with mainnet block production targeted for November 2026. Separately, MLabs completed three projects this week: Cardano.nix, Plutarch, and Research towards Tooling for Elliptical Curves. The Cardano.nix milestone updated cardano-node from 10.7.1 to 11.0.1, cardano-db-sync from 13.7.0.1 to 13.7.2.1, Ogmios from 6.14.0 to 7.0.0, and Blockfrost from 6.4.0 to 6.7.0.
The SEC's decision on a spot ADA ETF lands Oct. 23, 2026, a binary event that could either confirm the whale bid or strand it. ADA's support sits at $0.16-$0.17, with resistance at $0.20 and a heavier wall at $0.24-$0.25. The next milestones for the network are the Sept. 1 governance vote deadline and the year-end Dijkstra Phase 1 mainnet target.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
