Cardano's Hard Fork on Track for Next Month Amid Ecosystem Momentum

Cardano's upcoming hard fork is now expected to take place next month, according to founder Charles Hoskinson.

Hoskinson made this announcement during a February 19 livestream, where he also discussed the network's long-awaited Leios scalability upgrade and its timeline for delivery sometime this year.

He framed the coming weeks as a convergence of two parallel tracks: protocol and developer-stack upgrades on one side, and the Midnight network launch on the other. Midnight is a project that Hoskinson described as 'unusually difficult to ship even for teams with experience launching major chains.'

Hoskinson also highlighted various ecosystem developments, including a newly announced LayerZero integration that connects Cardano to more than 80 blockchains, as well as the stablecoin-like asset USDCx designed for non-EVM systems.

On Leios, Hoskinson expressed satisfaction with the pace of progress and flagged additional near-term milestones such as a new Plutus version, continued Aiken development, node diversity, and the integration of Pyth as a 'tier one Oracle' for Cardano. He also emphasized the importance of ecosystem maturity in the industry's central battle against permission federated networks owned by large financial institutions.