Dijkstra testnet opened October 21, 2026: What it means for the Cardano price

Published on 10/26/2026 at 18:31 | Editorial responsibility: Rafael Müller, Editor-in-Chief AD HOC NEWS

Epoch 660 recorded 1,780,896 transactions and 337,720 ADA in fees. The Cardano price is 0.2051 USD on October 26, 2026, down 0.46 percent.

Network activity and upgrade dates

Public testing began on October 21, 2026, as Cardano prepared its Dijkstra protocol transition.
Epoch 660 processed 1,780,896 transactions and generated 337,720 ADA in fees.
The Cardano price stands at 0.2051 USD as of October 26, 2026, 0.46 percent below the UTC daily close of October 25, 2026.
An Amaru node beta is scheduled for October 27, 2026.

Cardano, XCCRYPTOADA0, Illustration mit AI erstellt.

Cardano (ADA) entered public Dijkstra testnet testing on October 21, 2026, with the network running node version 11.1.3. Intersect reported on October 24, 2026, that stake pool operators could begin onboarding to the testnet ahead of a protocol transition.

The Cardano price is 0.2051 USD as of October 26, 2026, down 0.46 percent compared with the UTC daily close of October 25, 2026. The network upgrade and the market data are separate developments.

Dijkstra testnet opened with node 11.1.3

The public testnet is operating on protocol version 11, also known as Conway, while the planned Dijkstra transition would move it to protocol version 12. Intersect said on October 24, 2026, that the move requires the pre-release of node version 11.2 and a hard-fork initiation action. A hard fork is a network rule change that requires participating software to adopt the new protocol rules.

Intersect also described the later Leios rollout as a staged scaling plan. The initial target is 3 to 5 times the current transaction capacity, with later updates targeting 10 to 15 times. The report said stake pool operators would need to register BLS keys, cryptographic keys used for participation in Leios certificates, after the upgrade.

Epoch 660 reached 1,780,896 transactions

Cardano processed 1,780,896 transactions during Epoch 660 between October 6 and October 11, 2026, according to The Crypto Basic, citing Cexplorer data. The same report said the epoch generated 337,720 ADA in transaction fees across 21,243 blocks.

The report also gave an average of 83.83 transactions per block and an average fee of 0.19 ADA. Those figures describe activity during the five-day epoch and do not establish a sustained transaction rate for the network.

Amaru beta is scheduled for October 27, 2026

An alternative Cardano node client called Amaru is scheduled to enter beta on October 27, 2026, according to CoinShark. The report described Amaru as a separate node implementation and linked the release to ongoing work on Cardano infrastructure.

The Cardano price stands at 0.2051 USD as of October 26, 2026, according to Investing.com. The daily high is 0.2093 USD and the daily low is 0.2023 USD. Market capitalization is 7.56 billion USD, ranking Cardano 15th, while 24-hour volume is 166.63 million USD. Circulating supply is 36.81 billion ADA.