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Cardano (ADA) has entered epoch 666, yet another milestone for the blockchain, which has been live since its launch in September 2017.
The number has drawn attention for its connection to the biblical 666, but the development also points to the Cardano network's basic timekeeping and staking mechanism.
Popular Cardano blockchain explorer Cexplorer displays that epoch 666 started on Nov. 5, 2026, and is expected to end on Nov. 10, with 1 day and 10 hours left to close. The milestone marks another five-day cycle finished in Cardano's long-running proof-of-stake system.
Cardano divides its operation into epochs, which are five days long and consist of 432,000 one-second slots. The importance of epoch 666 is largely symbolic and not technical, as it does not coincide with any major protocol upgrades or hard forks. But the number 666 has merely provided an interesting talking point for the Cardano community.
In a separate milestone, the Cardano network has processed over 127,000,000 transactions on mainnet. According to Cexplorer data, Cardano has recorded a total of 127,203,164 transactions.
Cardano news
In upgrade news, DijkstraNet, the Dijkstra hard fork testnet, has been hard forked to protocol version 12 and 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 successfully used to transition DijkstraNet into the Dijkstra era, and DB Sync 13.8.0.0 was released for all networks.
In separate upgrade news, Midnight has completed its upgrade from Ledger 8 to Ledger 9, bringing new capabilities for developers alongside security, compatibility, and performance improvements across the network.
Ledger 9 introduces native support for widely used cryptographic standards including ECDSA and Keccak-256, expands wallet and custody compatibility, and enables contracts to interact directly with one another.
Keccak-256 is the standard algorithm that Ethereum uses to scramble data into fixed-length cryptographic fingerprints. ECDSA is the standard digital signature method that networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum use to prove ownership of a specific wallet address.