Cardano Dijkstra Era Unveils Major Upgrades in Coming Months

Cardano is on the cusp of significant development milestones in the months ahead. The Dijkstra era, which has been in the works, will see several key features and upgrades rolled out to Mainnet by the end of 2026 and early 2027.

The rollout will occur in two phases: Phase 1, which introduces Linear Leios with Nested Transactions, is expected to reach Mainnet by the end of 2026. This phase will provide an incremental rollout of key Dijkstra capabilities.

Phase 2, which includes Peras, will be activated through an intra-era hard fork in Q2 2027. Intersect has noted that work towards the Dijkstra era hard fork is progressing across node development, ecosystem readiness, and downstream tooling.

In preparation for the rollout, upcoming Haskell node releases will unlock early Dijkstra functionality for testing. The anticipated timelines for these releases are as follows: Cardano-node-11.1.1, expected by September 7, will remove legacy tracing system and fix known Genesis issues; Cardano-node-11.2, expected in less than a month, will contain the Dijkstra feature set but not be the hard fork release candidate; Cardano-node-12.0 is the definitive hard fork node release, with its launch timeline not yet determined.