Cardano's Dijkstra Testnet Opens for Business as the Network Aims for a 10x Throughput Bump

Cardano's public testnet for its next major upgrade went live this month, and it's the kind of thing that matters if you care about whether blockchains can actually scale. Intersect, the member-based group running Cardano's technical roadmap, opened DijkstraNet on October 21, kicking off what could be the network's most ambitious evolution in years.

Here's what's actually happening: stake pool operators and developers can now test drive Cardano's infrastructure as it prepares for a phased rollout across 2026 and 2027. The testnet runs accelerated one-day epochs—so you get weeks of testing compressed into days. That matters because when you're tweaking a blockchain's core consensus layer, you don't want surprises on mainnet.

The feature set is genuinely dense. Phase 1, aimed at Q4 2026, brings nested transactions, better account handling, guard scripts, and Plutus V4 improvements. Staking rewards become freely withdrawable, which solves a genuine friction point for users. Stake pool operators get a new protocol parameter called minPoolMargin that sets a floor on variable fees—something they've been asking for years.

But the real headline is Linear Leios, the scaling mechanism. Currently, Cardano processes about 4.5 kilobytes per second. Leios targets 3 to 5 times that in Phase 1, with subsequent tweaks potentially reaching 10 to 15 times current capacity. That's not a rounding error. That's transformative—if it works.

The rollout is staged. Pool operators register new BLS voting keys. Once 90–95% of the stake holds those keys, Leios endorser blocks start processing extra transactions. Capacity grows gradually based on how mainnet performs and whether the network's governance structures approve it. It's methodical, almost annoyingly so, but that's the point when you're messing with the core protocol.

Node version 11.2 is in active development and should land during the week Intersect made the announcement. It'll include all Dijkstra features except Linear Leios, which gets its own parallel testing environment called MusashiNet. This separation lets tooling teams experiment with the full feature set early while keeping the main testnet focused and stable. Node 11.3 will eventually merge both testing streams.

There's also a database optimisation being cleared for mainnet: Log-Structured Merge, or LSM, lets operators store ledger data on disk instead of purely in RAM. That cuts memory requirements to about 12 GB when enabled—a significant reduction for node runners who currently need beefier hardware.

Phase 2 arrives in Q2 2027 with Ouroboros Peras, a consensus tweak that uses stake pool voting to accelerate settlement. But here's the catch: both phases require rigorous testing on Cardano's Preview and Pre-production networks, plus on-chain governance approval. Those Q4 2026 and Q2 2027 dates are code-completion targets, not promised release dates. The constitutional changes and hard-fork actions need to pass Cardano's tripartite voting system—delegated representatives, pool operators, and the Constitutional Committee all get a say.

Intersect is already asking ecosystem participants to watch the Constitutional Amendment Portal for related proposals. If you're running a pool, building on Cardano, or operating infrastructure, you need to be paying attention now.

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