Cardano (ADA) is nearing the highly anticipated Chang upgrade with the recent release of Cardano Node 9.0. This significant milestone advances the Cardano blockchain toward one of its most ambitious upgrades, expected to go live by the end of July, and introduces decentralized governance, allowing the Cardano community to vote and shape the network’s future directly on-chain.

Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, welcomed the latest node release and underscored its importance. Hoskinson reacted to this milestone with enthusiasm, using a reference from "Lord of the Rings" to signify the beginning of this new phase for Cardano.

Cardano's history with upgrades has been notably positive, creating significant anticipation around the upcoming Chang hard fork. In 2021, a previous major upgrade saw the ADA price surge by 130% within a month. As a matter of fact, ADA is up 0.8% in the last 24 hours, trading at $0.37.

According to the GitHub documentation, this release includes all the changes necessary for the Conway ledger era, featuring on-chain governance via CIP-1694.

The updated node will bridge hard fork boundaries on both the mainnet and long-running testnets, such as Preprod. It allows for the bootstrap phase of CIP-1694 in production environments, but does not enable DRep voting and all governance actions. Version 9.0 also lacks a valid Conway-era Genesis file needed to cross the Chang hard fork, which will be provided later, requiring a minor configuration update.

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Gamza graduated with a degree in finance and credit with a specialization in securities and financial derivatives. He then also completed a master's program in banking and asset management.

He wants to have a hand in covering economic and fintech topics, as well as educate more people about cryptocurrencies and blockchain.