The Cardano blockchain has achieved a significant milestone with the successful execution of the Chang hard fork, which occurred on September 1, 2024, at 21:44 UTC at block number 10764778. This update heralds the “Conway Ledger Era,” and is part of a series of improvements aimed at decentralizing blockchain governance through the Voltaire upgrade phase.
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The core feature of the hard fork is the transformation of the governance model on Cardano, allowing every ADA holder to submit proposals or participate in the decision-making process. The Cardano Foundation confirmed this democratic shift in a statement on X, advertisement“Today’s Chang’e hard fork represents a major milestone for the Cardano blockchain, ecosystem, and community — realizing the promise of a truly decentralized, self-governing network. Welcome to a new era of decentralized governance: Voltaire.”
Romain Pellerin, CTO of Cardano development company Input | Output Spotlight Historical significance of the hard fork: “Chang’s upgrade was a success. “The power to decide, the freedom to act, is the only true freedom.” – Voltaire. Voltaire’s decentralized governance has been activated, and Cardano holders now have the power to decide the fate of the protocol on the chain. I have nothing more powerful to say than thank you for your hard work, Cardano people.”
Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano, in video In an update, he likened the hard fork day to “Independence Day” for the Cardano community. “Today, September 1, 2024, is the day we declare Independence Day, where the entire ecosystem, the community, and every ADA holder stands together as equals and all have a say in the future of not just this protocol but what this protocol can do for everyone in the world,” he noted.
Adding to the chorus of positive reactions, crypto analyst and vocal ADA supporter Dan Gambardello celebrated the completion of the Chang’e hard fork: “The Cardano Chang’e hard fork is complete! Cardano is officially a top 10 cryptocurrency, fully backed by the people. Now, you, the ADA holder, have a say in the future of Cardano and more control over its development. This is not just another blockchain; it’s a community-driven force.”
From a technical perspective, Chang’s fork is tough. It has been activated. Plutus v3, introduces advanced cryptographic primitives that support efficient zero-knowledge proofs via BLS12-381 curve pairs, on-chain multi-use computation, transaction signing via the Blake2b-224 hash function, and Ethereum signature verification using the Keccak-256 hash function, enabling enhanced cross-chain interoperability.
The update also includes improvements to smart contract performance by introducing “sum-of-product” encoding, which results in smaller, cheaper scripts and up to 30% faster execution times. The developer toolkit has been enhanced with new bitwise primitives like integerToByteString and byteStringToInteger for low-level data manipulation, which are essential for improved performance and cryptographic operations.
Additionally, improvements have been made to text size and throughput to reduce costs and improve operational efficiency, while supporting industry best practices and enhancing encryption capabilities in line with the latest standards.
A simple mistake ruins a successful activation.
Despite the successful deployment of these improvements, the hard fork encountered a technical issue. Intersect, a membership-based organization within the Cardano ecosystem, reported an issue with the ledger state snapshots that required immediate attention.
“Notice to Contract Users: The hard fork working group has identified an issue with the ledger state snapshots – requiring a hotfix to prevent longer syncs when restarting the contract. The hotfix is already in progress and will be available in the coming hours!” Intersect books Via X.
Intersect described a bug that has emerged, requiring a hotfix to prevent extended sync times when nodes restart. Specifically, nodes that restarted within 14 hours of the hard fork were not affected, but those that restarted after that will require a reboot from the genesis block. In response to this issue, a hotfix labeled Contract Version 9.1.1 has been announced as being in the works and is due to be released in the coming hours.
For users affected by the bug or those looking for more information, Intersect directed them to the dedicated Discord channel for the hard fork and advised them to keep an eye on the Cardano GitHub repository where the hotfix will be posted. As of press time, the development team was still working on finalizing the hotfix, with its imminent release, with the goal of resolving the sync issues.
At the time of publishing this report, ADA was trading at $0.3294.
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