Intersect announced Oct. 23 that public testing was available for Cardano’s planned Dijkstra upgrade, giving stake pool operators a test environment ahead of a protocol 12 hard fork.
The Cardano Operations Book says the test network remains on Conway, protocol version 11, and participants can sync it with node 11.1.3. Intersect’s announcement added that each epoch lasts one day. Intersect’s Sept. 5 update said early participation was intended to help stake pool operators, node operators and ecosystem developers prepare for the upgrade.
The next software milestone is node 11.2.0 as a pre-release. The Operations Book ties a testnet configuration change to that release, with the move to protocol 12 planned through a hard fork soon after. Intersect’s sequence also includes a separate hard-fork initiation action before the testnet changes versions. The Operations Book does not assign a date to that pre-release.
The official cardano-node repository listed 11.1.3 as its latest version on Oct. 24, with that release dated Sept. 29. No 11.2 release appeared on the page at the time of the check, leaving the pre-release step outstanding.
After the version change, the published test plan moves to integration testing for Dijkstra features without Leios. In an Oct. 9 update, Intersect said 11.2 was expected to include Dijkstra without Leios, while node 11.3 was planned to bring in Linear Leios alongside Dijkstra as a hard-fork release candidate.
The testnet is a preparation and integration network; making it available does not activate the upgrade on Cardano’s mainnet. Intersect’s earlier roadmap listed possible hard-fork windows from Dec. 5 to Jan. 4 with moderate confidence and Feb. 24 to March 26 with higher confidence. The roadmap did not specify years for those ranges or set a fixed mainnet date, so the next defined technical step in the current sequence is the node 11.2.0 pre-release.
