Cardano New Releases Herald Major Network Upgrade for Ecosystem

The Cardano ecosystem has welcomed new releases as optimism builds up for the upcoming Chang hard fork.

This development was brought to light in Input Output Global’s (IOG) most recent weekly report, which highlights developments and progress made in the Cardano ecosystem in the ongoing week.

As stated in the report, Cardano lightweight wallet Lace has released v.1.10, which features updates such as a much simpler onboarding user experience that reduces the time required for wallet creation, recovery and hard wallet onboarding. Other changes include a revamped dApp-wallet interface, enhanced stacking views with sorting options, a better search and a revamped stake pool view.

Additionally, Lace has fixed an issue that caused the staking center to be unavailable for some users after upgrading to Lace v1.10.

Hydra v.0.16.0 was also released this week, which includes support for Cardano node v.8.9.0 and the Conway block format. The Plutus Tx compiler was also updated this week, with version 1.26.0.0 set to be released soon.

Chang hard fork nears

At the start of the week, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson expressed optimism about two major upgrades to the Cardano network, at least one of which is planned for this year, in the face of recent criticism of ADA and the Cardano ecosystem.

“Chang is coming soon, as measured by progress on SanchoNet. Ouroboros Leios is the biggest step forward towards solving the blockchain trilemma ever. Our research labs are scaling up, we are now at 209 papers with much faster research translation,” Hoskinson wrote in an April 7 tweet.

The Chang hard fork, regarded as one of the Cardano network’s largest hard forks since the 2022 Vasil upgrade, is scheduled for the second quarter of this year. The upgrade is planned to provide ADA holders with voting rights on proposals, considerably accelerating Cardano’s path to decentralization.