Over 78% of Cardano Blocks in Last 8 Hours Minted by Chang Supported SPO

On-chain data shows that over 78% of the Cardano blocks produced in the last eight hours have been minted by an SPO that supports the Chang hard fork.

The Cardano community continues to anticipate the eventual launch of the Cardano Chang hard fork. This pivotal update is expected to transition the Cardano ecosystem to the Voltaire era. Voltaire, the last Cardano ecosystem era, will help bring decentralized community governance.

Amid the Chang hard fork anticipation, multiple stake pool operators (SPOs) have begun supporting node 9.1, the latest Cardano network update. The increasing support is expected to gradually phase the entire Cardano network into 9.1, marking the official transition to Chang.

Notably, data sourced by Cexplorer, a leading Cardano block explorer, confirms that over the last eight hours, 78.66% of the blocks produced by the Cardano network have been minted by SPOs running on the latest Chang-ready node 9.1.

While there is a minor decrease over a more extended timeframe, the prevailing data still shows encouraging stats. Notably, in the past 24 hours, 77.59% of blocks produced have gone through SPOs on version 9.1. In addition, this rate stands at 74.82% for blocks minted over the last two days.

The fact that most of the blocks produced on the Cardano network have gone through stake pool operators running on version 9.1 indicates that the ecosystem is now closer to Chang than perceived, about a month after the release of node 9.0. 

Cardano Ecosystem Prepares for Chang

However, the ecosystem still needs to satisfy other critical conditions before Chang can take full effect. Stake with Pride, a prominent Cardano SPO, outlined some of these conditions in a previous report. 

As part of these conditions, at least 70% of Cardano SPOs need to upgrade to node 9.1. In addition, centralized exchanges and ecosystem services have to upgrade to the latest version as well. Also, the ICC councils would need to create keys to replace the Genesis keys set to be destroyed.

Six days ago, The Crypto Basic confirmed that Bitfinex had become the first exchange to update to Chang. At press time, nine more exchanges, including Coinbase, Bitrue and WhiteBit are now set. This brings the total number of Chang-ready exchanges to 10, representing 17% of exchange readiness. Notably, 18 exchanges, including Binance, are in progress.

In addition, there is now a 78.22% of stake readiness, per data from Cardanoscan. However, the number of stake pools that are now ready amount to 930 of a total of 3,102. This brings stake pool readiness to 29.98%.