Epoch 666 arrives
Cardano has moved into epoch 666, a symbolic checkpoint rather than a technical upgrade. The network has used five-day epochs since it launched in September 2017. Each epoch contains 432,000 one-second slots, and staking and timekeeping run on that cycle.
Cexplorer lists epoch 666 with a Nov. 5 start date and a Nov. 10 close. The number has drawn attention because of its biblical association. On Cardano, though, it mostly gives the community something to talk about. It does not line up with a hard fork or a protocol change, according to the available details. Perhaps that is why the milestone feels bigger than it is. A round number can do that.
Transaction count crosses 127 million
Separately, Cardano mainnet has processed more than 127 million transactions. Cexplorer data puts the total at 127,203,164. That figure tracks activity on the main chain, not the value moved or the number of active users. Still, it gives a rough sense of how much the network has been used over time.
Upgrade work continues
Development work is also moving. DijkstraNet, the Dijkstra hard fork testnet, has been hard forked to protocol version 12. It is now available for testing and integration against the full Dijkstra feature set, with the exception of Linear Leios. Node 11.2 was pre-released on October 28 and was used to move DijkstraNet into the Dijkstra era. DB Sync 13.8.0.0 has been released for all networks.
Midnight has completed its upgrade from Ledger 8 to Ledger 9. The update adds support for ECDSA and Keccak-256, expands wallet and custody compatibility, and lets contracts interact directly with one another. Keccak-256 is the hashing algorithm Ethereum uses to create fixed-length cryptographic fingerprints. ECDSA is a common digital signature method used by Bitcoin and Ethereum to prove ownership of a wallet address.
For Cardano, epoch 666 is a calendar marker. The transaction total and the upgrade work are the more concrete items to watch.
