Input Output Global announced on July 10 that it is initiating a constitutional amendment to Cardano's governance framework ahead of the Dijkstra era upgrade. The amendment, authored by IOG Product Manager Carlos Lopez de Lara, is specifically designed to add protocol parameters introduced by new features to the Constitution's Guardrails Appendix. Among the features confirmed so far are Ouroboros Leios and nested transactions, with additional scope still being defined.

The submission deadline is epoch 655, which closes on September 11, 2026 at 21:44 UTC.

The urgency is structural. Cardano's on-chain Constitution, ratified in January 2026 with 79% of active delegated representative (DRep) voting stake in favour, includes a Guardrails Appendix enforced by a Plutus script. Any protocol parameter not explicitly listed in that appendix is permanently immutable. Governance bodies cannot adjust it, propose changes to it, or revisit it without a further constitutional amendment. "The Constitution only lets governance adjust parameters that are explicitly listed in its Guardrails, so the new parameters need to be added there to stay tunable," Lopez de Lara wrote in the IOG blog post. The amendment is not a discretionary reform. It is a compliance requirement written into the Constitution's own hard fork provisions (specifically HARDFORK-05 through HARDFORK-08).

The scope of the change is deliberately narrow. It covers only the new parameters and their acceptable ranges. Nothing else changes: voting thresholds, governance roles, community rights, and the foundational tenets of the Constitution remain untouched. "This amendment is purely technical, and we are keeping it strictly limited to the new protocol parameters and their Guardrails, nothing more," Lopez de Lara said. The Intersect Parameter Committee, which meets triweekly and is responsible for recommending parameter bounds, will define the valid ranges for each Leios and nested-transaction parameter. The Plutus team will then produce an updated Guardrails script. From there, DReps vote on the amendment, and the Constitutional Committee reviews it for constitutionality before it can take effect.

The Dijkstra era centres on Ouroboros Leios, a redesigned consensus protocol that separates transaction processing into parallel stages. Stake Pool Operators (SPOs) produce short-lived input blocks every 0.2 to 2 seconds, which are then collected and certified through a seven-stage pipeline. IOG projects throughput gains of 10 to 65 times current capacity, targeting 140 to 300 or more kilobytes of transaction data per second, up from roughly 4.5 today. A stress test on a prototype network in July 2025 demonstrated 1,000 transactions per second with non-Plutus transactions. Critically, Leios is designed so that throughput can be tuned through protocol parameters rather than requiring another hard fork. That tunability only exists if those parameters are inside the Guardrails.

Before Dijkstra can arrive, a preceding intra-era upgrade called van Rossem (Protocol Version 11) must first complete governance ratification on mainnet. As of July 3, 2026, DReps had approved van Rossem with 66.6% of voting stake, clearing the 60% threshold. SPO support stood at 43.37% against a required 51%, with ratification still pending as of that date. SPO node adoption has reached 89% of block production, and exchange readiness has crossed the 80% liquidity threshold. Van Rossem introduces 14 new Plutus primitives and unified compatibility across Plutus versions V1, V2, and V3, laying the infrastructure that Dijkstra will build on.

For communities in Africa and South Asia, the stakes around this amendment are concrete. Cardano's ecosystem in these regions is built on governance participation. A $30 million Africa-focused Project Catalyst grant pool opened earlier in 2026 and drew 180 project proposals from 14 countries in its first week. India has an active Cardano community of more than 200 members. On-chain governance is the mechanism through which these communities direct funding to local use cases including supply chain tracking, digital identity projects via Atala PRISM, and micro-DeFi applications. "The goal was never to bring Cardano to Africa. It's to build something with Africans that they actually own a piece of," said Alex Maaza, Ecosystem and Enterprise Growth Lead at the Cardano Foundation, speaking to TechCabal in June 2026.

If Dijkstra-era parameters go live without Guardrail listings, DRep delegates from these regions would have no on-chain mechanism to advocate for parameter configurations suited to high-volume, low-cost remittance corridors or congestion-sensitive financial inclusion tools. Getting the amendment ratified preserves that agency from the moment the upgrade lands.

ADA is currently priced at approximately $0.15, with a market cap near $5.59 billion and a CoinGecko ranking of 20. The token trades well below its 200-day moving average of $0.2969, though whale wallet concentration in the 10 million to 100 million ADA range grew from 37.66% to 38.13% of total supply in late June. These price dynamics carry governance implications: the token holders who delegate to DReps determine the stake weight behind each governance vote, making market conditions a background variable in ratification outcomes.

The Intersect Parameter Committee is developing the amendment through an open process with community input. If van Rossem ratification completes on schedule, the Dijkstra constitution update is expected to move to a DRep vote before the September 11 hard deadline. The Constitutional Committee is currently in an election cycle running through July 23, 2026. The body elected through that process will likely serve as the committee confirming the constitutionality of the Dijkstra parameter amendment, making the election directly relevant to the amendment's path to ratification. In that election, 9 DReps representing a combined 570.1 million ADA in voting power are participating.