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Cardano has just turned seven years old, and its developer, Input Output Global (IOG), took to X (formerly Twitter) to celebrate the milestone. In a celebratory tweet, IOG wrote: "Happy birthday, Cardano. 7 years. Millions of transactions. Over a thousand projects. One unstoppable community." 

The tweet was accompanied by a short clip highlighting the remarkable achievements and milestones that have marked Cardano's evolution.

Cardano, a proof-of-stake blockchain platform and the first to be founded on peer-reviewed research and developed through evidence-based methods, was launched in 2017.

Cardano has processed 95.6 million transactions since its inception, indicating growing adoption. The network has also seen significant development, with 74,700 Plutus scripts — the backbone of Cardano's smart contracts — and 1.33 million delegated wallets, indicating a robust staking ecosystem.

Other network highlights include 226 research papers, 1,373 projects currently building on the Cardano ecosystem and 12 rounds of Catalyst funding supporting over 1,800 funded ideas that push innovation forward.

Cardano's journey has been marked by significant upgrades and transitions through various eras.  Cardano's growing global impact was also highlighted in the clip, from summiting Everest to hosting events worldwide.

Cardano hard forks

Cardano has undergone several hard forks (a specific and mutually agreed-upon exact time slot when all nodes transition from the current era to a new one, applying new functions, validation criteria or parameter values) over its seven-year history, some of which were mentioned in IOG's post.

The Shelley hard fork triggered on July 29, 2020, introduced staking and decentralization features, transitioning the network from a federated to a decentralized system.

The Mary Hardfork launched on March 1, 2021, and brought native token functionality to Cardano, allowing users to create and transact with custom tokens.

The Alonzo hardfork initiated on Sept. 12, 2021, introduced smart contract capabilities using Plutus, enabling the deployment of decentralized applications (dApps). The Vasil hardfork launched on Sept. 22, 2022, improved the scalability and performance of the Cardano network.

The most recent, Chang, initiated on Sept. 1, 2024, introduced the first batch of decentralized governance features of CIP-1694, enabling only parameter changes and hard fork initiations, marking the first hard fork in the Conway era.