Cardano introduces plan 529 ahead of Plomin hard fork upgrade

Cardano has released Plan 529 as an important stepping stone to the Plomin hard fork that is set to enhance the blockchain’s governance and capabilities. This upgrade is named after Matthew Plomin, a key member of the community and the co-founder of the Cardano USDM stablecoin.

The Plomin hard fork, formerly known as Chang 2, is to occur at epoch 529, which is expected to start on the 20th of December, 2024. The date was announced by Intersect, a Cardano community entity that has been involved in coordinating the upgrade.

Plan 529 describes the process for the mainnet hard fork and raises an action for governance. This includes making sure that all the stakeholders are prepared for the change and the technical aspects of the change. The first implementation of the Plomin hard fork is scheduled for January 4, 2025. This timeline prevents interference with holiday time frames and provides ecosystem stakeholders with time to prepare.

The Cardano hard fork working group also stressed the need to make adequate preparations in order to avoid common mishaps that often occur during the process. This way, the community gets enough time to prepare for the changes necessary for the upgrade of the system.

The governance actions will adhere to the bootstrap governance of Cardano, which means that SPOs and the ICC will have the voting rights for the ratification. The final implementation may take place between January 4 and January 29, 2025. This will solely depend on the results of the voting and the operational conditions.

Besides Plan 529, a minor node release, version 10.1.3, has been released to fix certain problems, including solving Issue #4772. The update shows that Cardano is keen on ensuring that its network is stable in the course of the hard fork.

Cardano’s Hydra protocol achieves record high

This news comes as Cardano’s founder, Charles Hoskinson, pointed out strong performance metrics during the recent testing of the Hydra Head protocol. The load test was aimed at understanding the maximum throughput o f the Cardano blockchain and was able to process a staggering 134,464 TPS.  This is way above its normal 257 TPS throughput rate.

The Hydra Head protocol proposed by Input Output Global (IOG) is one of the most important solutions. It focuses on increasing Cardano’s transaction speed and capacity. It also deploys the latest layer-2 technology to accommodate high-traffic applications like gaming. 

The native token of the Cardano ecosystem, ADA, has been on the rise, following the general upward trend of the current bull market. ADA rose 2% in the last 24 hours to trade at $1.21, with the intraday range being a low of $1.1 and a high of $1.24. During the last 7 days, ADA has increased by 16%, and the monthly increase is 267.31%. The cryptocurrency is now trying to regain its all-time high of $3.10. 

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