Cardano (ADA) is making significant strides towards its highly anticipated Chang upgrade, recently unveiling Cardano Node 9.0.0. Romain Pellerin, CTO at Input Output Global (IOG), emphasized the importance of this milestone, describing it as pivotal and foundational. Time To Prepare According to Pellerin, operators are urged to prepare for the Chang upgrade, which introduces decentralized governance, empowering the Cardano community to influence the future of the network directly on-chain. The Chang upgrade, expected by the end of July, is set to be one of the largest updates for Cardano to date. Charles Hoskinson also commended the latest node release, underscoring its significance in the lead-up to the Chang upgrade. Historically, Cardano has experienced positive market responses following major upgrades, with previous instances indicating significant price surges. A Crucial Upgrade Node 9.0.0 is a critical release that includes essential changes for the Conway ledger era, encompassing on-chain governance through CIP-1694, support for Plutus v1 reference scripts, and Plutus script signature support via CIP-69. It marks the first node capable of spanning the 9.0 hard fork (Chang) boundary across mainnet and long-running testnets like Preprod. However, the production environment currently supports only the bootstrap phase of CIP-1694 under Protocol Version 9.0, pending the full transition to enable DRep voting and all governance actions under Protocol Version 10.0. A valid Conway-era Genesis file, necessary to complete the Chang hard fork, will be supplied later, necessitating a minor configuration update.
