Hey Cardanians! Welcome aboard the Weekly Cardano Digest #135!

We've filtered through all the noise to distill crucial updates into a breezy, 5-minute read. No need for you to sift through endless info ,we've got you covered. Ready to delve into this week's top Cardano news? Let’s dive in.

Here are the topics of the week:

• ⚡ The van Rossem Hard Fork Goes Live: Ratified Entirely by On-Chain Governance

• 🤖 Cardano Foundation Joins the Linux Foundation's x402 Foundation

• 🚛 Volvo Group Details Its Blockchain Supply-Chain Work With the Cardano Foundation

• Weekly Development Report

• & More!

⚡ The van Rossem Hard Fork Goes Live: Ratified Entirely by On-Chain Governance

On July 18, 2026 at 21:45 UTC, Cardano's van Rossem hard fork activated on mainnet. Protocol Version 11 is an intra-era upgrade within the Conway era: it adds new built-in functions to Plutus, cuts smart contract execution costs, and lays the protocol groundwork for the Dijkstra era, the phase that brings Leios and its throughput increase.

Readiness ahead of the switch was already high: 93%+ of blocks were being produced under V11, and 84% of exchanges, weighted by liquidity, were ready. The upgrade was ratified on July 13 with 77.63% of DReps and 52.7% of SPOs voting in favour, alongside six constitutional committee votes.

The detail that matters most: this is the first hard fork in Cardano's history initiated, debated and approved entirely through on-chain governance, rather than by the founding entities. #Cardano now upgrades itself by community vote, which is precisely what Voltaire was built for, and something no network of this size has done before.

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🤖 Cardano Foundation Joins the Linux Foundation's x402 Foundation

The Linux Foundation announced the operational launch of the x402 Foundation, and the Cardano Foundation joined as an Associate Member. x402 is an open standard that embeds payments directly into HTTP, letting AI agents, APIs and applications settle transactions programmatically inside an ordinary web request. The protocol code was originally contributed to the Linux Foundation by Coinbase.

The body launched with 40 member organizations. Premier members include AWS, American Express, Adyen, Circle, Cloudflare, Coinbase, Google, Mastercard, Ripple, Stripe and Visa, with fellow Associate Members including the BSV Association, Casper and OMA3.

This is a seat at the table rather than a technical integration and that is exactly the point. As AI agents begin transacting autonomously, membership gives #Cardano a voice in how the standard for machine-to-machine payments gets written, in the room where those rules are being drafted rather than after they are settled.

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🚛 Volvo Group Details Its Blockchain Supply-Chain Work With the Cardano Foundation

The Cardano Foundation published an interview with Volvo Group on how the manufacturer is using blockchain across its supply chain. Ivan Branco, who leads Information Management, AI and Analytics at Volvo Group Trucks Operations Belgium, walked through where shared ledgers solve real operational problems: supplier trust, compliance, and tracking the country of origin of every component.

The most notable disclosure: Volvo has been testing a proprietary cryptocurrency of its own, built for a closed environment covering transactions between material suppliers, transport suppliers and Volvo itself, specifically to strip out reconciliation complexity.

Branco framed the whole thing as a “business-value-first” decision rather than a technology bet. That is what enterprise adoption actually looks like on #Cardano, a manufacturer reaching for shared ledgers because spreadsheets and phone calls stopped working, not because of a token narrative.

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