Cardano has laid out a two-phase rollout plan for its next major protocol overhaul, known as the Dijkstra era, giving developers a staggered path toward a set of throughput and finality upgrades rather than a single large hard fork.
Phase 1 targets code completion by the fourth quarter of 2026 and centers on activating Ouroboros Linear Leios, a mechanism designed to increase transaction throughput by introducing supplementary endorser blocks alongside the chain’s standard blocks — effectively letting the network process and certify more transaction data per round without changing its core consensus rules.
Peras Follows in a Separate Hard Fork
Phase 2 will activate Peras, a separate protocol change aimed at faster transaction finality, through an intra-era hard fork scheduled for the second quarter of 2027. Splitting the work this way lets the Linear Leios throughput gains reach mainnet on their own timeline without being held up by the additional testing a finality-layer change like Peras requires.
According to an update from Intersect, the nonprofit organization coordinating Cardano’s open-source development, the network’s Haskell node team is holding the line on the end-of-2026 target for the first two Dijkstra components, Nested Transactions and Linear Leios.
A Second Node Client Enters the Picture
The rollout is happening alongside a separate but related development: Amaru, an independent Rust-based implementation of the Cardano node, is targeting November 2026 for mainnet block production. A second production-grade client reduces Cardano’s reliance on a single Haskell codebase — the kind of client diversity Ethereum has pursued for years as a resilience measure against bugs in any one implementation taking down the network.
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Why the Staggered Approach Matters
Cardano has drawn criticism in past cycles for slower feature delivery relative to competing layer-1 networks, so a concrete, dated two-phase commitment — rather than an open-ended roadmap — is itself notable for a project whose development pace has often been a point of comparison against faster-moving rivals. Whether Linear Leios and Peras deliver the throughput and finality gains developers are targeting will depend on how the testing period between now and the Q4 2026 code-complete milestone actually goes.
