Happy Birthday Cardano: 9 Years After Genesis Block Is Minted

Cardano is celebrating its ninth anniversary: the first Cardano genesis block was created on September 23, 2017, marking the beginning of the network. The mainnet launched six days later, on September 29, 2017, introducing ADA and beginning Cardano's journey as a public blockchain.

The crypto community is posting birthday wishes on X, including from non-custodial staking infrastructure provider Everstake and the Cardano Foundation, which highlighted crucial milestones attained by the network.

"Nine years ago, Cardano's first block was minted. Since then: 2,890 stake pools, 13,978,119 blocks, 123,982,111 transactions, a constitution ratified on-chain, 36,322 votes on 158 governance actions and a vibrant community behind all of it," the Cardano Foundation wrote.

The genesis block launch on September 23 marks one of the two important dates in Cardano's history; the other is September 29, 2017, when the mainnet launched.

Nine years after the first genesis block, Cardano has processed over 123 million transactions and activated 11 major upgrades, moving through Byron, Shelley, Allegra, Mary, Alonzo, Lobster, Vasil, Valentine, Chang, Plomin, and van Rossem.

Byron launched in 2017 as a federated network. The biggest upgrades were the Shelley upgrade in July 2020, which replaced federated block production with community stake pools, and the introduction of smart contract functionality via the Alonzo upgrade on September 12, 2021 (following token locking in Allegra and native assets in Mary).

Application performance was improved with Vasil in September 2022 and Valentine in February 2023. On-chain governance went live through the Chang upgrade in 2024 and the Plomin hard fork in 2025. The first hard fork to receive 100% approval by on-chain votes from all three governance bodies, Van Rossem, was activated on July 18, 2026.

What comes next?

Everstake explains Cardano's developments over the past nine years and what's next, highlighting that the network continues to power its scaling roadmap.

Hydra is Cardano's Layer 2 scaling solution; Leios and Peras are being developed for the next level of Layer 1 performance. Leios estimates a 10x to 65x increase in throughput capacity through its planned phases, whereas Peras is focused on faster settlement.

There are already future updates in the pipeline, including Dijkstra Phase 1, which introduces the Dijkstra ledger era and Linear Leios, targeting Q4 2026. The open-source Rust node for Cardano, Amaru, will begin producing mainnet blocks in November 2026, with Peras launching in Q2 2027.