Cardano’s Van Rossem Fork Clears 77.6% DRep Vote as Shorts Crowd $421M OI
Cardano hit protocol v11 without IOG involvement as ADA jumped 8%; derivatives show whales buying spot while traders lean short.
Cardano has moved to protocol version 11 after its Van Rossem hard fork was ratified by the network’s full governance stack, marking the first major mainnet upgrade executed without direct involvement from Input Output Global. ADA jumped 8% to $0.1752 on the news, even as the token remains down more than 95% from its all-time high. Derivatives data tracked around the event shows a split market: spot whale accumulation at levels last seen in 2023, while open interest tilts toward shorts.
Governance math: 52.7% SPO backing, 77.6% DRep approval
Stake pool operators cleared the fork with 52.7% of the vote, just above the 51% threshold required for activation. Delegated representatives backed the proposal more decisively, at 77.6%, and the Constitutional Committee signed off to confirm alignment with Cardano’s published roadmap. The Hard Forking Working Group was credited with coordinating ecosystem partners, SPOs, DApp teams, developers and exchanges across the mainnet transition.
“The van Rossem hard fork has been successfully enacted on Cardano Mainnet!” the working group said, adding recognition for those “coordinating ecosystem partners, SPOs, DApps, developers and exchanges across multiple networks to ensure a safe Mainnet event.”
The upgrade is named for Max van Rossem, a Cardano contributor who died last year, and its core technical objective is cutting Plutus smart-contract execution costs to make dApp deployment cheaper for developers. Reports on the timeline vary between a July 18 activation and confirmation reported on July 21, but the on-chain outcome — protocol version 11 live on mainnet — is consistent across coverage.
Positioning split: whales buy spot, futures traders go short
Ahead of and around the fork, Cardano futures open interest rose 4% to roughly $421 million, according to derivatives data cited by Cryptonews. The long-to-short ratio sat at 0.58, indicating short positioning outweighed longs across tracked exchanges even as the upgrade approached activation.
That skew contrasts with reported whale accumulation on spot markets, which reportedly reached levels not seen since 2023. The divergence — larger holders adding exposure while leveraged traders crowd the short side — is the kind of setup that can precede a short squeeze if the fork narrative continues to draw fresh spot demand, though it can equally resolve the other way if momentum fades post-upgrade.
Next: Ouroboros Leios and infrastructure handover
Cardano’s roadmap now shifts toward Ouroboros Leios, the protocol upgrade developers say could push throughput up to 65 times current levels and beyond 1,000 transactions per second. Van Rossem is being framed internally as validation of the network’s decentralization push: in August, control of core infrastructure — the Haskell node, the Plutus platform, the Daedalus wallet and the Hydra scaling tool — is scheduled to transfer from IOG to independent specialist firms.
For traders, the near-term signal is the tension between the $421 million open-interest base skewed short and spot-side whale buying. Whether ADA’s 8% pop holds will likely depend on whether Ouroboros Leios delivers visible throughput gains, or whether the token reverts to the broader downtrend that has defined most of 2026.
Read more: XRP Open Interest Rises 5.9% as Spot Flows Collapse Over 97% Across Exchanges