Node 10.7.0 Rolls Out: Cardano's Van Rossem Fork Gets Its Plutus Toolbelt

Cardano is giving its intra-era hard fork, Protocol 11 (dubbed the van Rossem fork), a final buff and wax, with a crucial node release now idling at the starting line. Intersect, the member-based organization steering the Cardano ship, announced on March 19 that a pre-release of Cardano Node 10.7.0 is due to drop in a matter of days—so devs, start your engines.

The network began this upgrade pit stop back in February with Node 10.6.2. The imminent 10.7.0 release is set to be the main launch vehicle for ecosystem upgrades, carrying a payload of new features that extend beyond the fork itself. Once the binary is live, projects are expected to bolt it into their tooling and run exhaustive tests—because in crypto, you don't just wing it with a major version bump. Depending on how performance and integration shake out, a few more minor releases might tailgate this one.

A compatible DBSync version, built specifically for Node 10.7.0, is scheduled to roll out right behind the node's release. The upgrade brings zero serialization changes, meaning your hardware wallets can keep napping peacefully. Developers can already tinker with the pre-release, and the 10.7.x line will eventually get a promotion to version 11 to fork the Preview and PreProd testnets—the final dress rehearsals before the mainnet show.

Protocol 11 delivers a fresh toolkit of new Plutus built-ins: CIP-138 (Array type), CIP-153 (MaryEraValue type), CIP-109 (modular exponentiation), CIP-132 (dropList), and CIP-133 (multi-scalar multiplication over BLS12-381). Intersect confirmed these new primitives are already live and kicking on SanchoNet, which has been upgraded to Protocol 11, and Scalus's smart-contract tooling has been updated to support them—so the builders can start building.

The van Rossem fork is a modest, intra-era tune-up that leaves transaction shapes completely untouched, keeping the migration effort about as low as a validator's gas fee. Its main victories are faster Plutus execution, new cryptographic party tricks via the fresh built-ins, and cleaner ledger rules—all achieved without breaking a single existing contract, which is more than can be said for some other chains' "upgrades."