Cardano Turns 7: Millions of Transactions, Thousands of Projects, and One Unstoppable Community

Cardano has just turned seven years old, and its developer, Input Output Global (IOG), took to X (formerly Twitter) to celebrate the milestone.

Cardano, a proof-of-stake blockchain platform, recently celebrated its seventh anniversary. Its developer, Input Output Global (IOG), marked the occasion with a tweet highlighting the platform's achievements.

"Happy birthday, Cardano. 7 years. Millions of transactions. Over a thousand projects. One unstoppable community," IOG wrote in the tweet, which included a short clip showcasing Cardano's journey.

Launched in 2017, Cardano has processed 95.6 million transactions to date, indicating increasing adoption. The platform's development is also evident, with 74,700 Plutus scripts — the foundation of Cardano's smart contracts — and 1.33 million delegated wallets, suggesting a strong staking ecosystem.

Other network highlights mentioned in the clip include 226 research papers, 1,373 projects building on the Cardano ecosystem and 12 rounds of Catalyst funding supporting over 1,800 funded ideas that contribute to innovation.

Cardano's journey has seen several upgrades and transitions through different eras, and its growing global impact is highlighted in the clip, from summiting Everest to hosting events worldwide.

Hard forks in Cardano's historyCardano has undergone several hard forks (a specific and mutually agreed-upon exact time slot when all nodes transition from the current era to a new one, applying new functions, validation criteria or parameter values) throughout its seven years, some of which were mentioned in IOG's post.

The Shelley hard fork, which triggered on July 29, 2020, introduced staking and decentralization features, transitioning the network from a federated to a decentralized system.

The Mary Hardfork, which launched on March 1, 2021, brought native token functionality to Cardano, allowing users to create and transact with custom tokens.

The Alonzo hardfork, which initiated on Sept. 12, 2021, introduced smart contract capabilities using Plutus, enabling the deployment of decentralized applications (dApps).

The Vasil hardfork, which launched on Sept. 22, 2022, improved the scalability and performance of the Cardano network.

The most recent, Chang, which initiated on Sept. 1, 2024, introduced the first batch of decentralized governance features of CIP-1694, enabling only parameter changes and hard fork initiations, marking the first hard fork in the Conway era.