We’ve recently upgraded all infrastructure to a new version of the Cardano Node which has been released, preparing for the Conway era. If you’ve been following along for a while you’ll recall the Cardano penchant for naming ledger eras after major figures from science and literature. John Conway is a significant figure in mathematics who is most famous for a cellular automaton called Game of Life (which has been shown to be Turing complete).
The Conway era will introduce important new capabilities for Cardano that improve interoperability with other chains such as Bitcoin, and will pave the way for the creation of side chains such as Midnight. Given the previous era was named Alonzo (after the mathematician Alonzo Church who created Lambda calculus that forms the basis of smart contracts on Cardano), we leave it as an open question for the reader on the reason for the choice for this era.
The versioning numbers for the node have also been modified to align with the protocol version for the ledger (we are currently on protocol version 8), hence the apparent jump from 1.35.x. This is simpler to understand which is good.
The development cadence for Cardano is not slowing during the bear market and this bodes well for wider adoption when we move into the next bull phase.