Cardano Dijkstra Upgrade Seeks to Boost Throughput and Speed Transaction Settlement

The Cardano Dijkstra upgrade is a two-phase plan to increase throughput and speed up transaction settlement. The first phase, targeting code completion in Q4 2026, will introduce the new ledger era and activate Ouroboros Linear Leios. This change adds a second block type called Endorser Blocks that reference additional transactions instead of carrying them directly.

The second phase, targeting Q2 2027, will activate Ouroboros Peras through an intra-era hard fork that skips a new era package. Peras adds a voting overlay to the Praos chain-selection rule, allowing stake pool committees to vote on recent chain tips and treating those tips as settled well before standard Praos depth would allow.

Other features coming with Dijkstra include nested transactions, guard scripts, account address enhancement, and pledge leverage-based rewards. These changes are tracked as formal CIPs (Cardano Improvement Proposals) and will be implemented in the first phase.