Weekly development report as of 2026-05-22

CORE TECHNOLOGY

This week, the consensus team delivered the first voting capability in the Leios prototype: nodes now diffuse votes over a dedicated mini-protocol, and a voting thread casts votes on completed endorser-block closures. This forms the foundation for committee-based endorsement and is exercised by new threadnet property tests (#1963).

The team continued working on Leios, reworking the prototype branch to target the same ouroboros-consensus-3.0.1.0 release delivered as part of cardano-node v.11.0.1, so downstream consumers building against that node release can pick up Leios without a separate consensus branch (#2041). The team is also adding late-join support, so a node joining the network after an endorser block was produced can still resolve the resulting certified blocks (#2040), and replacing the placeholder voting from #1963 with stake-based committee selection and real BLS signatures, so votes are individually validated before being relayed (#2039). Performance work on the in-memory Leios database is also underway, addressing contention and laziness issues that were causing nodes to time out under load (#2032).

As part of treasury funding initiative 10, the team retired the V1 LedgerDB implementation and the LMDB backing store. V2 has been the default for some time; removing V1 deletes a substantial amount of unreachable code, drops the LMDB dependency, and simplifies the LedgerDB API – snapshots no longer block the caller, and the tryFlush no-op has been removed (#2030). This paves the way for adding more tables to the ledger state and storing them on disk.

WALLETS AND SERVICES

Lace is now available on iOS, completing the multi-platform rollout launched with Lace 2.0. One wallet, three chains, available on browser and mobile.

SCALING

The Mithril team completed the refactoring of the recursive circuit, the preparation of the prover input implementation in the STM library, the off-circuit verification tests for the recursive SNARK circuit prototype, and the replacement of the temporary certificate circuit with the STM circuit. They also continued work on circuit key caching for the SNARK circuit in the STM library, the recursive SNARK aggregation primitives prover input, the preparation of the SNARK-friendly genesis certificate implementation, and the non-recursive certificate circuit benchmarks.

Additionally, the team continued work on shipping the Mithril signer node binary in the Cardano node bundle, robust support for unknown and in-progress signed entity types, enforcement of the DMQ message ID format, and enhancements to immutable file synchronization for the Cardano database.

Finally, the team completed enforcement of Mithril crate versions in downstream Mithril crates and added more details to the protocol security page on the website.

RESEARCH

This week, the research team hosted an X Space featuring Charles Hoskinson and Professor Aggelos Kiayias to dive into the IOR proposal. The discussion centered on the three themes of the proposal: post-quantum security, scalability, and human-centered design. The speakers emphasized that Cardano’s first-principles methodology is the soul of the brand. This approach has been vindicated, as other ecosystems are pivoting towards the same peer-reviewed, academic, research-based foundations that Cardano pioneered.

Ultimately, the session underscored that a positive vote on this pivotal proposal is an investment in future-proofing Cardano, ensuring it retains its science-based advantage and remains the industry leader in evidence-based blockchain development.