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Cardano is gearing up for the second phase of Chang, a pivotal upgrade designed to implement the final features of Cardano’s minimum viable on-chain governance.

In a recent tweet, Cardano builder Input Output Global (IOG) shared the highlights of October's main updates and achievements from across the Cardano community. The number of token policies increased by 3,287, and the number of minted native tokens increased by 60,000. Plutus scripts grew by 3,358 to a total of 91,698.

The total number of transactions increased by 0.98 million over the last month to a total of 97.92 million.

Development highlights for October include the implementation of final improvements and fixes for the Conway ledger era, set to become effective during the bootstrap period. Node v.10.1.1 was also released. 

This is significant as Cardano Node 10.1.1 marks the first mainnet release node capable of passing the Chang #2 inter-era hard fork. The Chang upgrade #2 brings full on-chain governance, as stated in CIP-1694, bringing an end to the current bootstrap governance phase, which began with the Chang upgrade #1 hard fork on Sept. 1.

In October, the "Using Plutus TX section of the user guide" was also updated, and two CIPs were submitted for built-in arrays and maps. In a scalability milestone,  the Mithril distribution 2442.0 was released, providing reliable support for decentralized signature orchestration in both signer and aggregator roles. 

Other development highlights

As Cardano moves toward decentralized governance, Intersect, a member-based organization for the Cardano ecosystem, held its first full-scale election for seven committees and the Intersect board. Two board members and 29 committee members were chosen from a field of 140 applications. A second round of elections will take place in April 2025.

Project Catalyst also made remarkable progress in October, with Catalyst Fund13 advancing into the community review stage. Catalyst is also nearing a milestone of 1,000 completed projects.

The Cardano Summit event in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was a key event for the Cardano community, supported by IOG's Education team, which participated in the panel speech, the Tech Forum and Cardano Asado community events.