According to U.Today, Cardano (ADA) is making significant progress towards its much-anticipated Chang upgrade, as indicated by the recent release of Cardano Node 9.0.0. This development brings the Cardano blockchain a step closer to one of its most significant upgrades. Romain Pellerin, CTO at Input Output Global (IOG), referred to this development as a 'big deal' and a 'foundational moment'. He urged operators to prepare for the Chang upgrade, which will introduce decentralized governance, allowing the Cardano community to vote and shape the network’s future on-chain.
The Chang upgrade, one of the largest in Cardano's history, is expected to take place by the end of July. The latest node release is a crucial step towards this upgrade and has been praised by Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson. Cardano's history with upgrades has been notably positive, which adds to the anticipation surrounding the Chang hard fork. Before its previous major upgrade in 2021, ADA surged by 130%, rising from $1.35 to $3.10 within a month. At the time of writing, ADA was down 0.60% in the last 24 hours to $0.372.
According to GitHub documentation, Node 9.0.0 is a significant release of the Cardano node that includes all the changes required for the Conway ledger era. This includes on-chain governance via CIP-1694, support for Plutus v1 reference scripts, and Plutus script signature support via CIP-69. This is the first node capable of bridging the 9.0 hard fork (Chang) boundary on both the mainnet and long-running testnets, such as Preprod. However, it only allows for the bootstrap phase of CIP-1694 in production environments (Protocol Version 9.0), not the transition to enable DRep voting and all governance actions (Protocol Version 10.0). Node 9.0.0 is delivered without a valid Conway-era Genesis file, which is required to cross the Chang hard fork. This will be provided at a later date, requiring a minor configuration update.