Weekly development report as of 2026-04-24

CORE TECHNOLOGY

This week, IO’s treasury proposals went live on the proposals website. The teams submitted nine proposals focusing on performance, scalability, and capability improvements, with a funding ask of just under 50% of last year’s and a clear focus on delivery.

Delegated representative (DRep) voting is open now and closes on May 24.

Explore the full set of proposals.

This week, the consensus team continued Leios prototype development as part of the 2025 Treasury Funding Initiative 4 (Leios implementation). They fixed a crash in the prototype’s fetch decision logic (#1996), added cumulative transaction bytes to the ledger state and exposed them as a Prometheus metric – giving operators a direct measure of throughput on the proto-devnet (#1988, cardano-node#6536) – and added a confirmed-transaction throughput panel to the proto-devnet dashboard (ouroboros-leios#859). They also hardened the prototype’s test suite around endorser-block inclusion to make it easier to extend to upcoming features such as voting (#1971), and started aligning the prototype with the original Leios design by migrating the endorser-block announcement and certification flag from the ledger block into the Praos header (ouroboros-leios#837). Additionally, the team is investigating a performance bug observed during the March demo, in which the time between forging and storing an endorser block can stretch to minutes, disrupting protocol operation (ouroboros-leios#844). A work-in-progress snapshot of the SQLite latency investigation from March was shared, which informs Leios-related storage work (ouroboros-leios#863), and the logbook update from the 2026-04-09 consensus office hours was posted (ouroboros-leios#854).

As part of the 2025 Treasury Funding Initiative 17 (maintenance and support), the team defined sensible default values for PerasParams, simplifying configuration for downstream users (#1998). On the documentation side, they added an explanation page describing the data flow between consensus components (#1955), published a first iteration of an explanation page covering the Ouroboros Praos consensus protocol (#1960), and removed leftover documentation stubs while cleaning up the sidebar on the consensus website (#1956). Finally, they released ouroboros-consensus-3.0.1.0 (#1987), bumped the node’s consensus dependency to 3.0.1 to propagate recent improvements to cardano-node (cardano-node#6533), and re-landed the rework of snapshotFromIS as part of ongoing improvements to ledger snapshotting (#1992).

SMART CONTRACTS

This week, the Plutus team made several improvements to the UPLC executable. They added support for hex-encoded scripts and blueprint JSON as inputs, with the ability to optimize all scripts they contain. They also added the ability to certify optimizations and generate a certifier report for each optimized validator, addressed several flags to give users control over optimization behavior, and enabled evaluation of a script with user-supplied input before and after optimization.

The UPLC executable is included with every Plutus release. While it supports a range of use cases, its most immediately useful feature for most developers is script optimization. Preliminary testing suggests that applying these optimizations to recent mainnet scripts yields, on average, a 10% reduction in execution cost and a 2% reduction in script size. User documentation for the UPLC executable is currently in progress.

The Cardano High Assurance team delivered a completely formalized example from the Invariant0 Capture-the-Flag, showing how users can formalize their own smart contracts and discover vulnerabilities.

SCALING

This week, the Mithril team completed production readiness preparations for circuit keys and trusted setup in the STM library. They continued work on the golden tests for the recursive SNARK circuit prototype, enhancements to witness preparation for the non-recursive prover, deterministic proof generation in golden tests, and data encoding and state transition tests for the recursive SNARK circuit prototype.

The team also completed the explorer update for Cardano blocks and transactions, the documentation of the Cardano blocks and transactions signature on the website, and the plan to sunset Cardano transaction certification. They continued work on the upgrade to Cardano node v.10.7 and on the preparation of the next distribution, 2617.

Finally, they investigated an issue with signer registration in the SNARK prover, fixed flaky end-to-end tests, and worked on supporting multiple tiers for CI tests.

VOLTAIRE

In the latest news on the Intersect committee elections, 105 candidates are standing for the 37 available seats.

Voting is underway and continues until 12 noon UTC on Friday, May 1.

RESEARCH

This week, the research team is working on their treasury proposal.

Read more about the team’s strategic collaboration with the Archimedes Research Unit in Greece in the latest blog post.