Cardano (ADA) Marks 9 Years Since Genesis Block With 123.98M Transactions

Nine Years of Cardano On-Chain

Cardano (ADA) marked nine years since the minting of its genesis block, produced on September 23, 2017 — six days before the mainnet went live on September 29, 2017 and the chain began operating as a public blockchain. The milestone generated a wave of anniversary posts across X, and the Cardano Foundation, the organization tasked with supporting ecosystem development and upholding network standards, published the network’s cumulative scorecard in an official post. It records 2,890 active stake pools, 13,978,119 blocks and 123,982,111 transactions processed over the nine-year span, alongside a constitution ratified on-chain and 36,322 votes cast across 158 governance actions.

official posthttps://x.com/Cardano_CF/status/2102732897451139475

The two September dates carry distinct weight in Cardano’s history: the genesis block established the ledger’s starting state, while the mainnet launch made ADA transferable and opened the network to the public. Governance is the domain Cardano has developed most aggressively since 2024, and the voting tally is evidence the mechanism is being exercised rather than merely installed. In its post, the Foundation paired the numbers with a nod to “a vibrant community behind all of it,” framing the anniversary as both a technical and social milestone. Averaged across the period, the chain has settled roughly 13.8 million transactions per year since launch, and every figure in the scorecard is verifiable on-chain. Non-custodial staking provider Everstake, which runs proof-of-stake infrastructure on the network, marked the date separately via its own post, framing the anniversary as one stage in a development program that is still running. Cardano’s early years looked very different — the Byron era ran as a federated network before block production was handed to the community, a transition covered in detail below.

posthttps://x.com/everstake_pool/status/2102724472402796728

Eleven Upgrades and a Scaling Roadmap

The anniversary doubles as a checkpoint for the network’s technical evolution. Cardano has activated 11 major upgrades since launch — Byron, Shelley, Allegra, Mary, Alonzo, Lobster, Vasil, Valentine, Chang, Plomin and van Rossem. Byron arrived in 2017 as a federated network; the July 2020 Shelley upgrade replaced federated block production with community-run pools, turning choosing a Cardano stake pool into a practical decision for ADA holders. Allegra brought token locking, Mary introduced native assets, and Alonzo delivered smart contract functionality on September 12, 2021. Vasil in September 2022 and Valentine in February 2023 sharpened application performance, while Chang in 2024 and the Plomin hard fork in 2025 took on-chain governance live in stages.

The most recent fork, van Rossem, was activated on July 18, 2026 and is the first hard fork to win 100% approval through on-chain votes from all three governance bodies — a level of consensus no earlier upgrade reached. Looking forward, Everstake’s rundown highlights Hydra, the Layer-2 solution for processing transactions off the main chain, alongside Leios and Peras, which target Layer-1 performance: Leios’s planned phases are projected to raise transaction capacity by a factor of 10 to 65, while Peras pursues faster block finality. The published timeline puts Dijkstra Phase 1 in the fourth quarter of 2026, Amaru in November 2026 and Peras in the second quarter of 2027. Everstake, which laid out the Cardano scaling roadmap for its anniversary audience, said it continues to support the plan — and the ecosystem’s reach now extends past the base chain to the privacy-focused Midnight network. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Bitget.

From Anniversary to Scaling Deadlines

COINOTAG’s read of the anniversary scorecard: the consequential line is not the transaction count but the governance record. A ratified constitution and 158 voted actions show the machinery is exercised at scale, and van Rossem’s unanimous approval indicates the three governance bodies can converge when the roadmap demands it. The next twelve months test whether that consensus holds under delivery pressure, with Dijkstra Phase 1, Amaru and Peras all due before mid-2027. ADA spot slipped 3.6% over the past 24 hours, extending the slide our recent ADA price analysis followed toward $0.20 support — a muted market backdrop to the milestone. Separately, the Foundation’s move to fold ADA into the official x402 kit for AI agent payments signals where it expects usage to come from next.