Highly Anticipated Cardano Chang Hard Fork Hit With Another Delay — Charles Hoskinson Reveals Why

Much to the chagrin of the Cardano (ADA) community, the project’s co-founder Charles Hoskinson has announced another unfortunate delay of the much-anticipated Chang hard fork.

Chang is the biggest upgrade to the Cardano blockchain since the Vasil hard fork, which was completed in September 2022. The upcoming fork is positioned as a game changer for Cardano development as it’s expected to usher in community governance in the network’s quest to achieve true decentralization. In the forthcoming Age of Voltaire, Chang is one part of the puzzle that seeks to change Cardano into a phase of self-sustaining governance with developers keen on rolling out a voting and treasury management system.

Originally scheduled to go live on the mainnet next week, Hoskinson has now revealed that the hard fork has been postponed to September 1. He blamed Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, and other unnamed centralized exchanges for the delay.

“It looks like Binance and a few others need more time to get their houses in order, so the rocket is going to wait on the pad, another epoch for the weather to get better,” Hoskinson explained.

The magic of deadlines is that people who aren't taking upgrades seriously suddenly say damn we got to get moving. When they get moving, we converge quickly.
It looks like Binance and a few others need more time to get their houses in order, so the rocket is going to wait on…
— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) August 23, 2024

Hoskinson Expects Nothing To Stop Cardano’s Upgrade To Voltaire

Chang is named in honor of Phil Chang, a pioneer leader in Cardano governance who sadly passed away in 2022. As you may recall, the August 27th target date was announced by Cardano developers after over 70% of Cardano stake pool operators (SPOs) upgraded to the latest node version.

The Chang hard fork is supposed to push Cardano into Voltaire. But despite the delay, Hoskinson emphasized that nothing would prevent Cardano from transitioning to Voltaire:

“Nothing is going to stop the upgrade to Voltaire. We have an elected government that has to take power. The rocket isn’t leaving the pad. We just have to wait for the weather to clear,” he postulated in a follow-up X post.

Hoskinson had previously stated that he expected the Chang hard fork to happen in June, but that deadline passed with no launch after a hacker attempted to crash the network via a distributed denial-of-service attack, which forced the Cardano team developers to implement another node upgrade.

Industry commentators expect the forthcoming Chang hard fork to give the price of Cardano a much-needed bullish boost in light of its ousting from the top 10 largest cryptocurrencies on the crypto leaderboard. ADA was surpassed by Tron (TRX) earlier this week, marking the second time the Hoskinson pet project has been dethroned this year, after being flipped by Telegram-linked Toncoin (TON) in May.

The excitement surrounding the imminent major network upgrade, however, has already sparked a resurgence of optimism in ADA as the coin has since reclaimed its spot above TRX, according to CoinGecko.