Cardano Van Rossem vote set for May 29 pending Ogmios

Intersect submitted the PreProd governance action for Protocol Version 11, nicknamed Van Rossem, on May 8. The upgrade cleared the Preview testnet the same day, but the Hard Fork Working Group declined to recommend ratification because Ogmios and related infrastructure were not judged ready. The May 29 mainnet vote is conditional on those dependencies.

Intersect described V11 as an intra-era upgrade within the Conway era that includes ledger, node and Plutus scripting changes. Intersect said ADA holders will retain full wallet and token access during the transition. Under current governance bootstrapping rules for V11, only the Constitutional Committee and stake pool operators may vote; wider delegation and DRep participation are expected in a later phase.

Plutus, Cardano’s smart contract language, receives the largest set of changes. V11 makes built-in functions available across Plutus V1, V2 and V3, adds case expressions for common data types and introduces new built-ins such as arrays, improved list handling and optimized multi-asset value operations. Intersect said these changes are intended to improve script performance and reduce execution costs.

V11 adds two cryptographic primitives. CIP-133 introduces multi-scalar multiplication (MSM) over the BLS12-381 curve; tests showed an MSM of 10 G1 points used about 7.74% of a transaction’s computational budget and that operations above 129 points exceeded what a single transaction could contain. CIP-109 adds modular exponentiation as a built-in, noting some current on-chain implementations of certain inverses can consume 5% to 9% of CPU budget.

The MSM work has been linked to a Halo2-Plutus verifier and to plans for a zero-knowledge bridge. V11 also enforces VRF key uniqueness at the ledger level, preventing two stake pools from reusing the same verifiable random function key.

If PreProd dependencies clear and the governance action is ratified on or around May 29, the V11 codebase will be activated on mainnet and its features will become available to developers. Activation timing will depend on infrastructure readiness even after a successful vote.

Cardano’s on-chain activity metrics remain smaller than several other smart-contract networks. ADA traded near $0.249 with a market capitalization around $9.2 billion, down about 5.8% over seven days and about 92% below its all-time high. Cardano carried about $129 million in DeFi total value locked, a stablecoin market cap near $46.7 million and roughly $615,138 in 24-hour decentralized exchange volume.

By comparison, Solana had more than $6 billion in DeFi TVL, roughly $15 billion in stablecoins and about $1.14 billion in 24-hour DEX volume; Ethereum carried about $43.4 billion in DeFi TVL and $164.8 billion in stablecoins. Those figures produce a market-cap-to-TVL ratio of about 72x for Cardano, compared with roughly 8x for Solana and 6x for Ethereum.

Observers will track changes in DeFi TVL, stablecoin supply, DEX volume and active contract deployments after any V11 activation. The May 29 governance action will also serve as an early coordination test for stake pool operators and the Constitutional Committee under Conway-era rules.