Cardano Major Milestones Coming in Months Ahead: What to Expect

Cardano is entering a potentially important stretch of development, with the Dijkstra era moving toward key milestones in the months ahead.

The initial Dijkstra rollout is planned in two phases, introducing Linear Leios with Nested Transactions and Peras, respectively. The current objective is to deliver Phase 1 (Nested Transactions and Linear Leios) to Mainnet by the end of 2026, providing an incremental rollout of key Dijkstra capabilities, with Phase 2 (Peras) to be activated in an intra-era hard fork in Q2 2027.

According to Intersect, work toward the Dijkstra era hard fork continues to advance across node development, ecosystem readiness, and downstream tooling. In a recent report, Intersect highlighted what to keep an eye on in the months ahead.

Upcoming Haskell node releases will unlock early Dijkstra functionality for testing, with four major node releases anticipated over the coming months.

Anticipated timelines

Cardano-node-11.1.1 is expected early, by September 7, for Mainnet usage. This node release removes the legacy tracing system and fixes known Genesis issues.

Expected in less than a month, Cardano-node-11.2 will contain the Dijkstra feature set, ready for testing, but will not be the hard fork release candidate.

This node release will not contain the Leios elements, as these are largely limited to consensus and block production, but this should not impact testing and development against all other Dijkstra features.

Cardano-node-11.3 is targeted as the hard fork release candidate, capable of crossing the hard fork and containing all Dijkstra functionality, including Leios, and is anticipated in the next one to two months.

Cardano-node-12.0, according to its naming convention, will be the definitive hard fork node release, with its launch timeline not yet determined.

In order to begin testing and development of the Dijkstra feature set, including Plutus V4, Nested Transactions, and CIP-50 (Cardano Improvement Proposals), there will be a publicly available “DijkstraNet,” following the release of node 11.2.

DijkstraNet will run in parallel to MusashiNet, which will continue to test and evaluate Leios development alongside the Dijkstra feature set being implemented on DijkstraNet.

Dates for two planned node diversity workshops are given as Singapore (TOKEN2049), October 6, and London, November 13–14.

Governance participants can monitor planned Dijkstra-related constitutional amendments to be publicly proposed. Following a recalibration of the technical delivery plan, the current moderate confidence window places potential Dijkstra hard fork enactment between December 5, 2026 and January 4, 2027 while the high confidence window runs from February 24, 2027 to March 26, 2027.