Crypto: Cardano’s Next Upgrade Hangs in the Balance in the Coming Hours

Cardano is approaching an uncomfortable deadline. The vote to renew its Constitutional Committee expires on September 1 at 21:44 UTC. DReps are almost at the required threshold, with 66.3% against the required 67%, while stake pool operators remain much further behind at 39% versus the necessary 51%. If the vote fails, part of the network’s governance could be temporarily paralyzed.

And behind it, the timelines for Dijkstra and Leios.

Crypto: Cardano Is Still Short of Votes

With less than 30 hours remaining before the deadline, the situation differs sharply between the two constituencies.

DReps are now just 0.7 percentage points short of the 67% threshold. For Stake Pool Operators, the gap is still 12 points. Intersect is therefore calling on pool operators to vote before the “Update Constitutional Committee 2026” action closes.

This vote is the final step needed to install the four candidates selected in the 2026 Constitutional Committee election.

Governance is no longer a mere administrative detail for Cardano. Since the Plomin hard fork, a significant share of decisions concerning the protocol has been made directly through these on-chain mechanisms.

This development echoes a question already visible in other crypto debates: how much weight should be given to the different participants when a network has to change its own rules?

Cardano Could Paralyze Its Own Governance

The problem stems from the timing of the mandates.

Some current members of the Constitutional Committee are reaching the end of their terms. Without renewal, the committee would fall below committeeMinSize, which is now set at five members.

At that point, several operations would become impossible to ratify.

Treasury withdrawals. Parameter changes. Constitutional amendments. Initiating a hard fork.

Intersect had specifically lowered this threshold from seven to five in July to prevent a single vacancy from being enough to jam the entire system. In its official update on Cardano governance, the organization explains that a failed renewal could nevertheless put the network back in this situation.

The paradox is rather striking: Cardano has built one of the most sophisticated decentralized governance systems in the crypto market, and that governance now depends sufficiently on participation to slow down its own upgrades.

This deadline comes on top of the other catalysts recently being monitored around Cardano and ADA.

Dijkstra and Leios Are Behind the Vote

Dijkstra is Cardano’s next major technical milestone.

The first phase is expected to introduce Linear Leios as well as Nested Transactions. Leios is intended, among other things, to significantly increase the network’s capacity by allowing more data to be processed in parallel rather than forcing all the work onto the main block.

Cardano’s teams are still targeting deployment of this first phase on mainnet before the end of 2026. A second phase incorporating Ouroboros Peras is planned for 2027.

Development is continuing normally, moreover: the teams are already working on BLS keys, Dijkstra blocks, nested transactions and the Leios prototype.

The risk is therefore not technical.

Without an operational Constitutional Committee, the governance actions needed to support Dijkstra could be delayed. Intersect itself acknowledges that the vote’s failure could affect the hard fork’s timeline.

The vote is also taking place as Cardano remains under observation around its key market support levels. But its immediate issue is clearly the network’s ability to operate its own governance.

Cardano therefore does not have 30 hours to “save its network.” It has 30 hours to avoid creating its own bottleneck just as one of its most ambitious upgrades approaches.