Cardano's Protocol 11 hard fork is targeting an April 2026 deployment backed by significant development activity with 680 weekly commits across 80 repositories. The upgrade delivers faster and cleaner execution for Plutus smart contracts, adding new cryptographic tools, tighter ledger rules, and internal node improvements. Intersect confirmed the fork will not alter transaction formats, minimizing ecosystem upgrade effort. Input Output Engineering is preparing two node releases tied to Protocol 11, with the first being Cardano node 10.6.2 expected within one week.