CORE TECHNOLOGY

This week, the consensus team focused on Mithril integration: nodes running on an on-disk backend can now export snapshots in the portable in-memory format, allowing Mithril signers to obtain the agreed format directly from the node. They also implemented a new snapshot policy that makes ledger state snapshot timing predictable using agreed-upon cadence values.

On the maintenance side, the team updated db-analyser to start analysis from a snapshot at a specified slot, avoiding full replays from genesis, and fixed a rare snapshot error on epoch-boundary blocks. 

Finally, the team shipped full-text search on the consensus documentation website, built as static files with no external service required.

WALLETS AND SERVICES

This week marked an important milestone for the Lace team as Lace Carbon entered internal testing.

Built on the foundations of Lace 2.0, Lace Carbon represents the next evolution of the wallet experience, with a focus on delivering a faster and more intuitive user journey.

Internal teams are now putting it through its paces and providing feedback ahead of a future opt-in release. We're looking forward to sharing more details in the coming weeks.

SCALING

This week, the Hydra team released 2.2.0, bundling the partial fanout implementation and hydra-tui revamp. The release also delivers a significantly expanded benchmark suite, including real-world TPS metrics, a Mixed UTXO generator, and a new matrix sub-command that sweeps cluster sizes and UTXO shapes. The team also unified on-chain membership checks around the BLS accumulator, reducing the snapshot-signing tuple and removing redundant hashing, and started optimizing snapshot processing so script-heavy heads avoid re-evaluating Plutus scripts that have already been validated.

The Mithril team completed the prover input preparation and SNARK proof verification for the recursive SNARK aggregation primitives and adapted the certificate chain to support recursive SNARKs. They continued work on creating the SNARK proof with the circuit, wiring the SNARK proof in the aggregate signature, refactoring the preparation of the prover input, adding the missing ancillary data for the IVC aggregate signature creation, and updating the Midnight ZK library audit status for SNARK.

Additionally, they completed the optimization of the end-to-end tests for SNARK, updated the ledger state snapshot selection in artifacts, upgraded to Pallas 1.1.0, and enhanced support for discontinued signed entity types in the aggregator.

Finally, the team continued work on shipping the Mithril signer node binary in the Cardano node bundle, the release of the 2625 distribution, and the fix for the aggregator switch in the explorer.

VOLTAIRE 

Candidate registration for constitutional committee elections closes this Sunday, June 21, at 21:45 UTC — and there is a development worth noting. Five candidates have now registered for four available seats, meaning the election is competitive, if only by a narrow margin. This is a meaningful improvement from last week, when the candidate count matched the number of open seats exactly.

Registration is still open. More candidates would strengthen the outcome, and anyone considering running should act now. Waiting until the last minute creates unnecessary risk, especially if there are wallet issues, signing issues, or questions about the registration process.

Once registration closes, DRep voting begins at the epoch boundary on June 23 and runs through July 23. The election uses stake-weighted voting: each DRep may vote for up to four candidates, and each candidate they vote for receives that DRep's full voting power. The four candidates with the highest total voting power at the close of voting will form the election outcome, which will then support an on-chain Update Committee governance action to seat the new members before current terms expire in September.

If you believe you have the experience, judgment, and commitment to contribute to Cardano governance at this level, please consider registering before the deadline:

Candidate registration

Election documentation

Weekly AMA sessions.

RESEARCH

This week, the research team is progressing work on Cardano Vision 26 workstreams and has published a blog on a recent Cryptographic Tools for Blockchains workshop at Eurocrypt '26.


Weekly development report as of 2026-06-19

SMART CONTRACTS

This week, the Cardano High Assurance team has finalized a beta version of the property-based testing tool and is pursuing internal testing. The team introduced a testing interface to easily explore a vast variety of scenarios, automated positive testing to verify the contracts meet their specifications, negative testing to ensure the testing interface is not overly restrictive, threat models to automatically discover common weaknesses, and testing coverage to ensure that no line of code was left untested.

The team is working on a Visual Studio code extension that will make exploring the testing outcome easier and debugging faster. They have also been experimenting with developing a complete AI skill that makes the process of writing this testing interface as simple as possible.

SCALING

This week, the Mithril team completed the implementation of the SNARK-friendly genesis certificate and the type-consistency and naming-alignment refactoring for the SNARK recursive circuit. They continued work on the prover input and the SNARK proof verification of the recursive SNARK aggregation primitives, and on adapting the certificate chain to support the recursive SNARK.

Additionally, they completed support for DMQ ledger peers, enforcement of the DMQ message ID format, and a prototype for Cardano node ledger state certification. They also continued shipping the Mithril signer node binary in the Cardano node bundle and updating the ledger state snapshot selection in artifacts.

Finally, the team completed the upgrade of the DMQ node to 0.6.0.0, removed support for Mithril nodes in the devnet, and continued work on optimizing the end-to-end tests for SNARK.

VOLTAIRE 

The call is out for more candidates to register for the Cardano constitutional committee. Four seats will become vacant as members’ terms expire in September, and only four candidates have registered for the upcoming election. If no additional candidates register before the June 21 deadline, there will be no competitive election.

This committee is very important to Cardano governance because many governance actions need approval from two-thirds of the constitutional committee.

Several people have already indicated their interest. If you feel you can contribute to this important committee, register today.

RESEARCH

This week, the research team's IOR proposal for Cardano Vision 2026 was ratified with a confidence vote of 74.96%. Thank you to all the DReps and the wider Cardano community who voted in favor - your support and confidence are appreciated. Community feedback across all votes is valued and will inform delivery going forward.


Weekly development report as of 2026-06-12

CORE TECHNOLOGY

This week, the performance and tracing team published release benchmarks for node v.11.0.1 and ran feature benchmarks for TxSubmissionLogicV2 and compiler version comparisons. On the development side, the team removed legacy tracing and completed work on genesis caching and post-processing infrastructure. The cardano-tracer HTTP API for metric time-series queries and Grafana datasource integration is also complete and awaiting merge. Leios mempool benchmarks using tx-centrifuge are underway. Finally, the team merged the formal trace schema definition with the conformance framework to be presented at the Porto workshop. Learn more here.

The consensus team worked on Leios prototype development, starting the migration to the Dijkstra era of the Cardano node, enabling stake pool operator key registration, and aligning the prototype with the audited BLS cryptography. Work is ongoing on endorser block application, mempool partitioning, and throughput dashboard integration.

On fetch and network design, the team continued investigating multi-peer endorser block fetch strategies, refined the safety argument for Linear Leios, and concluded that erasure coding is unlikely to pay off at this stage. The change to the committee selection scheme was merged into the Leios SIP, reducing the certificate size from around 8 kB to 200 bytes.

The team also began discussions on mempool design for Leios, with approaches under consideration including two distinct mempools and a directed acyclic graph for the ledger.

As part of the UTXO-HD and Ledger-HD initiatives, work continued on the UTXO-HD redesign, LSM snapshot export, and the migration of InstantStake to the redesigned UTXO-HD as a pattern for the remaining datasets. Finally, the team worked on predictable ledger state snapshots in cardano-node and on enabling search on the consensus documentation site.

WALLETS AND SERVICES

This week, the Lace team released Lace 2.0.6. This release resolves the issue with DRep ID message signing on mnemonic wallets, enabling authentication for the Intersect Hydra voting DApp. DRep IDs are now displayed in CIP-129 format for improved clarity and compatibility, stake key message signing is supported on Ledger hardware wallets, and connected accounts are always shown during message signing flows. The release also fixes an issue where network selection was not always preserved when migrating from Lace v1 to v2.

SCALING

This week, the Hydra team merged the partial fanout feature and is preparing for the release. Heads with large UTXO sets can now be fanned out in multiple steps, each verified on-chain via a BLS accumulator membership proof, with the chunk size dynamically determined by binary search to maximize outputs per step. This removes the previous limit on UTXOs per head. Alongside this, the hydra-tui received a significant refactor, the test suite migrated to tasty, and several correctness fixes landed around cross-head event contamination and recovered deposits leaking back into L2.

The Mithril team completed caching of circuit keys for the SNARK circuit in the STM library and removed the helpers module for the SNARK recursive circuit. They continued work on the type consistency and naming alignment refactoring of the SNARK recursive circuit, the prover input of the recursive SNARK aggregation primitives, and the implementation of the SNARK-friendly genesis certificate.

The team also completed enhancements to support the genesis verification key in the explorer. They continued work on shipping the Mithril signer node binary in the Cardano node bundle, enforcing the DMQ message ID format, prototyping the Cardano node ledger state certification, and removing Mithril node support in mithril-devnet.

Finally, the team worked on optimizing end-to-end tests for SNARK and fixing flakiness in the CI.

RESEARCH

This week, the research team is sharing content from last week's Cardano R\&D session, which delved deeper into the IOR proposal, focusing on post-quantum security, exploratory research on sharding, and updates on consensus, scalability, and other workstreams in Cardano Vision 2026. If you missed the event or want to catch up on discussions, you can watch the recording. 

The team has also published a blog post on Linear Leios outlining the Leios roadmap to solve the blockchain trilemma.

The IOR proposal future-proofs Cardano. We are down to the final days – make your vote count today!  Voting is open until June 8.


Weekly development report as of 2026-06-05

CORE TECHNOLOGY

This week, the ledger team focused on the Plutus context performance work: the validation rules now consume precomputed information stored in StAnnTx rather than recomputing it, completing an optimization arc spanning several cycles. In parallel, work began on removing the legacy Coders machinery from the codebase, with several call sites already migrated to a new SparseKeyed alternative.

On the Dijkstra era front, the team introduced a dedicated transaction\_mempool rule to distinguish the mempool transaction decoder from the one used inside the block body, tightened the chain\_code specification to 32 bytes, and completed a fixes pass ensuring all CDDL tests pass. 

Conformance testing preparation for Dijkstra also advanced, and the canonical ledger state work continued with a new entities/accounts/v0 namespace and a refactor of gov/proposals/v0 to preserve proposal order.

Finally, the team added two new microbenchmarks for the TICK and NEWEPOCH rules to support epoch transition performance analysis, and introduced a new generate-cbor CLI tool for generating CBOR for any rule in any era from the command line – useful both internally and for downstream consumers such as serialization libraries and alternative node implementations.

SMART CONTRACTS

This week, the High Assurance team completed formalizing the latest built-ins, arrays, and values, and achieved 100% compliance with the conformance test suite. The tool is ready for the upcoming hard fork changes and will run on the latest release of Plutus core.

Last but not least, the community granted funding to the consortium between Harmonic Labs, IO, Lantr, Midgard Labs, No.Witness Labs, SAIB, and TxPipe to develop an extended version of Blaster, integrate it into Aiken, Pebble, Futura, and Scalus, and improve the user experience through a container-based development environment, Visual Studio Code extensions, and generic property sets and security checks.

SCALING

This week, the Mithril team completed the analysis of the impact of the recursive SNARK on the security of the Mithril protocol, implemented benchmarks for the non-recursive SNARK, and refactored the error handling of the SNARK recursive circuit. They continued work on circuit key caching for the SNARK circuit in the STM library, removing the helpers module for the SNARK recursive circuit, the prover input for the recursive SNARK aggregation primitives, and implementing the SNARK-friendly genesis certificate.

They also enhanced the synchronization of immutable files in the Cardano database, implemented robust support for unknown and in-progress signed entity types, removed the Cardano database v1 backend, and continued working on the prototype for Cardano node ledger state certification. Additionally, they enforced the DMQ message ID format and enhanced the support of the genesis verification key in the explorer.

Finally, the team completed the update of the protocol security page on the website and continued work on shipping the Mithril signer node binary in the Cardano node bundle.

The Leios team made progress across protocol design, implementation, and testing.

The Cardano community voted to approve Leios' funding through the treasury with 88% support, and the on-chain action is poised for enactment. This secures the resources needed to carry Leios from prototype to mainnet hard fork.

On the protocol design side, the team merged an update to CIP-0164 that replaces the original voting committee design with a stake-based committee selection scheme. The practical effect is a significant reduction in certificate size – from ~8 kB to~ 200 bytes, roughly 40× smaller – reducing bandwidth, storage, and validation cost on every block.

The Leios reference implementation was successfully rebased onto Dijkstra, the upcoming Cardano ledger era, in a cross-team effort spanning the ledger, network, consensus, and node repositories.

Finally, the dedicated red team demonstrated Piranha, a new attack-simulation tool designed to coordinate and evaluate attacks on the protocol, supporting the high-confidence testing track.

VOLTAIRE

Cardano’s constitutional committee elections are coming, with candidate registration now open, and voting scheduled from June 13 to July 13. As usual, Intersect has stepped in to represent the community in facilitating this election, even though it is a Cardano election, not an Intersect one.

Candidate registration closes on Saturday, May 30, so there’s still time to go to the voting page and submit your application. However, note that, unlike in previous years, when generating credentials before registering was optional, this year it is mandatory.

RESEARCH

This week, the research team hosted the first Cardano R\&D session of 2026, in which researchers outlined the workstreams of the IOR proposal that will shape Cardano’s development. They discussed post-quantum security, Ouroboros Leios, ZK capabilities for Cardano, and explored examples of foundational research such as sharding, incentives, and relationship credentials. 

Voting on the IOR proposal is open for DReps until June 8.


Weekly development report as of 2026-05-29

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.


Weekly development report as of 2026-05-22

CORE TECHNOLOGY

This week, IO’s core technology teams released Cardano node v.11.0.1, the first release to support the protocol version 11 intra-era hard fork. This enables the upgrade to protocol version 11 once the hard fork governance action has been voted on by stake pool operators, delegated representatives, and the constitutional committee, and enacted on the chain. The release also bumps cardano-api and cardano-cli to their 11.0 series and advances the experimental hard fork target to protocol version 12. Additionally, it adds HTTPS support for EKG and Prometheus metric servers in cardano-tracer, along with a new timeseries store exposed via REST API.

Benchmarking reports relevant to the 11.0.1 release are available in this post.

The ledger team continued preparations for the upcoming Dijkstra era.

On CIP-118 nested transactions, the team updated the CDDL specification of block to match CIP-0176 non-segregated block body serialization, added a dedicated block\_body, and added an EncCBORGroup instance for DijkstraBlockBody to unblock downstream integration in consensus. They also fixed serialization for DijkstraTx and integrated StAnnTx – the state-annotated transaction representation that memoizes the Plutus parts of validation – into the LEDGER, UTXOW, UTXO, and MEMPOOL rules across every era, realizing the performance benefits of earlier memoization work end to end. Several guards were also added to the Plutus V1–V3 context translation so that new Dijkstra features unsupported by older language versions cause translation to fail explicitly rather than silently producing an incorrect context. The team also completed preparation work for running conformance tests in Dijkstra and began reorganizing the test hierarchy around a new class-based ImpSpec approach that enforces a common set of tests across all eras.

On the Ledger-HD, the streaming infrastructure for injecting large volumes of data from genesis files is now complete, covering stake pools and the remaining state needed for testing and benchmarking work targeting constant-memory reads from disk.

The CIP-165 canonical ledger state expansion continued with two additional namespaces added under the new namespace-based query interface: entities/dreps/v0 and entities/stake\_pools/vrf\_key\_hashes/v0.

Finally, on the maintenance side, the team expanded examples and added golden tests for all queries migrated from consensus to ledger, and did the same for transaction examples. They published the changelog for the cardano-node-11.0 release, made ZeroTreasuryWithdrawals a permanent governance check for every era, starting with Conway, and switched ChainData and Attributes to use ByteArray instead of ByteString to avoid pinned-memory fragmentation. Finally, they adjusted several NoThunks instances and fixed a cuddle failure on Plutus Constr data and a bug in its CDDL spec definition.

SMART CONTRACTS

This week, the Plutus team published a blog post about the improved UPLC command-line tool. Among other things, the tool can optimize Plutus scripts, with experiments on recent mainnet scripts indicating average execution cost savings of more than 10%.

Several further improvements to UPLC optimization have been integrated into the tool in recent weeks, including a new --inline-unconditional-growth flag for tuning inliner aggressiveness, Agda certifiers for several optimization passes, a new constant-folding pass, and a pass that hoists polymorphic built-ins to reduce the use of force. Common subexpression elimination (CSE) has also been improved.

Feedback, bug reports, and ideas for further improvements are welcome via GitHub issues in the Plutus repository.

SCALING

This week, the Hydra team released hydra-node 2.1.0, bringing improved deposit security, a new SQLite-backed event store, a ~7% reduction in snapshot confirmation latency, and compatibility with the Cardano node protocol version 12+. All operators are encouraged to upgrade. 

The team also upgraded to cardano-api 11.1 and cardano-node 11.0.1 to support protocol version 12+, and switched from a lazy to a strict Map to reduce memory pressure during transaction processing. Work continues on partial fanout and a user-friendly configuration file for hydra-node to replace the current command-line flags.

The Mithril team completed the trusted setup validation for the SNARK circuit in the STM library, the implementation of standard Schnorr signatures in the STM library, the implementation of the SNARK-friendly protocol message, the in-circuit and off-circuit verification tests for the recursive SNARK circuit prototype, the preparation of the recursive circuit refactoring, and the preparation of the prover input implementation in the STM library.

The team also prepared the ledger state certification proof of concept and continued work on enforcing the DMQ message ID format.

Finally, they completed the upgrade to Cardano node v.11.0, updated all GitHub runners to Ubuntu 24.04, and continued work on robust support for unknown and in-progress signed entity types.

RESEARCH

This week, the research team held a session on Cardano Over Coffee to discuss the IOR treasury proposal, hosted by Fergie Miller, director of research partnerships. The team is also hosting an X Space next week with Aggelos Kiayias, chief scientist at IO. Details will be shared on our socials soon!


Weekly development report as of 2026-05-15

CORE TECHNOLOGY

Over the past few weeks, the consensus team has continued working on the Leios prototype development as part of the treasury funding initiative 4. The team completed migrating endorser-block announcements and certification flags from the ledger block to the Praos header, aligning the prototype with the original Leios design (#1978, ouroboros-leios#874, cardano-node#6537). They also fixed several bugs in the Leios prototype, helped the system reliability team spin up a Leios testnet that is now running the prototype, and continued working on the voting prototype as well as on the fix for in-memory LeiosDB performance issues observed during the March demo (ouroboros-leios#844, cardano-node#6554). The team is now working on applying certified endorser blocks to the mempool. 

Additionally, as part of the Ledger-HD (treasury funding initiative 11), the team refactored consensus-type variables so that ledger tables, transaction inputs, and transaction outputs are indexed by the block type rather than the ledger-state shape, collapsing duplicate type-class instances and simplifying the codebase ahead of Ledger-HD integration (#2016, #2019).

In terms of maintenance and support (treasury funding initiative 17), the team pre-released Cardano node v.11.0 and expanded the documentation by adding an explainer on the consensus layer's ticking mechanism. 

SCALING

This week, the Leios team merged the documentation website and development tracker into a unified site. Additionally, in their April session, project leads discussed a successful prototype demonstration that achieved significant transaction throughput while testing new features including vote diffusion and included several fixes. The team reported progress on benchmarking and stress testing efforts aimed at optimizing transaction validation and network efficiency across various hardware configurations. They also made technical adjustments to committee selection and cryptographic keys, moving toward more deterministic and smaller certificates for better scalability. Additionally, the team progressed work on network fetching logic and simulation models to ensure robustness against latency and adversarial conditions, and reviewed the development roadmap covering the progression from controlled testing environments toward a production-ready mainnet release.

The Hydra team made progress on partial fanout, including KZG trusted setup with G1 accumulator commitments. They switched from list to Seq for faster benchmark runs at higher transaction counts and fixed a file-handle exhaustion issue by ensuring connections are closed properly. They also upgraded Mithril compatibility, added a fallback so nix develop works on aarch64-darwin, and updated the Pumba flake to build on modern Mac hardware.

The Mithril team completed the data encoding and state transition tests for the recursive SNARK circuit prototype, as well as the detection of SNARK circuit modifications in the STM library. They continued work on implementing a SNARK-friendly protocol message, the trusted setup validation for the SNARK circuit in the STM library, the implementation of Schnorr signatures in the STM library, and the in-circuit verification tests for the recursive SNARK circuit prototype.

The team also continued work on robust support for unknown and in-progress signed entity types, as well as enforcement of the DMQ message ID format. They completed the ledger state snapshot conversion tests in end-to-end tests and added support for stable and unstable versions of the OpenAPI specification.

Finally, they accelerated SNARK circuit tests in CI, upgraded Node.js 20 GitHub Actions, and fixed flaky nightly tests and circuit golden tests.

RESEARCH

This week, the research team has submitted their proposal on-chain and published a blog on research as one of Cardano’s core competitive advantages.


Weekly development report as of 2026-05-08

CORE TECHNOLOGY

IO's treasury proposals are live on the proposals website. For context on previously funded work, the team published the Q4 2025 – Q1 2026 delivery report, which covers what IO delivered for Cardano under the previous funding cycle.

To support the community in reviewing the proposals, IO has been hosting a series of X Spaces. A general kickoff session launched the process, followed by two dedicated spaces covering four proposals: Cardano upgrades, developer experience, Cardano High Assurance, and Plutus. The April 29 session covered Leios and layer 2 scalability proposals. Follow IO on X for more details on the upcoming spaces.

Delegated representative (DRep) voting is open now and closes on May 24. Explore the full set of proposals.

The ledger team progressed work on ledger rules for nested transactions and on translating newer features into the Plutus context. They introduced a change to how the Plutus context is prepared for each transaction entering the mempool – when fully integrated, this is expected to result in meaningful performance improvements.

Additionally, the team transferred all ledger state queries from the consensus component to the ledger component and introduced an initial stage of streaming injection functionality. This will be used for testing and benchmarking, particularly for on-disk storage scenarios where large volumes of data need to be injected into the ledger state without affecting operating memory.

Finally, they fixed several CDDL bugs identified using the new AntiGen and cuddle tools, and improved examples and facilities for golden tests.

WALLETS AND SERVICES

Lace mobile is now available on Android, with iOS support to follow. The release brings core wallet functionality to mobile – sending and receiving assets, staking, swapping, and DApp connectivity – without requiring a desktop. This release also marks the start of Lace 2.0, a step toward a multi-chain experience across Cardano and Bitcoin.

SMART CONTRACTS

This week, the Cardano High Assurance team demonstrated two new tools that together enable automatic correctness proofs for Cardano smart contracts, from source language down to the CEK machine, against the actual ledger rules.

The first, PlutusCoreBlaster, is a complete executable formalization of the Cardano CEK machine, UPLC, and Plutus Core built-ins in Lean 4. Any UPLC program can be imported, and correctness theorems can be written against its actual execution – not a model, but the real implementation. This means developers can use the UPLC output from any surface language (Aiken, Plinth, Plutarch, or others) without needing to model their contract separately.

The second, CardanoLedgerAPIBlaster, is an executable formalization of V1, V2, and V3 script contexts and ledger rules, reflecting the actual design choices made by the node – consistent with what runs on preview, pre-production, and mainnet.

To demonstrate what the tooling unlocks, the team formalized the sellNFT contract using CardanoLedgerAPIBlaster and ran Blaster on it. The proof revealed a double-satisfaction vulnerability. Combined, the two tools give developers a complete path: write a contract, import it, state your properties, and Blaster automatically proves them against the real CEK machine and ledger rules.

Join the team's Discord discussions and see the 2026 funding proposal to extend this work on the proposals website.

SCALING

Over the past few weeks, the Leios team improved the prototype's storage system, which had been affecting the test suite and proto-devnet runs, restoring stability in both environments. They published the first ledger throughput benchmarks for processing transactions with and without validation, confirming the expected speedup from reapplication over initial validation. More coverage will be needed, but the team is cautiously optimistic about this crucial aspect that underpins the Leios protocol's security. 

The team also began work on replacing the current 'always certified' shortcut with real vote traffic, while also aiming to simplify the committee selection scheme, allowing for smaller votes, certificates, and faster verification. Additionally, they updated the prototype to place endorser-block announcements in the Praos block header, aligning the implementation with the protocol specification. The team updated the cost estimate analysis and interactive tool to use the CIP-164 Linear Leios protocol, providing better guidance on expected operational costs for SPOs.

Finally, the liveness proof for the Agda formal specification – covering honest chain growth and chain quality – was submitted for review, closing the last major open gap in the formal specification.

The Mithril team released the 2617.0 distribution – read the developer blog for more details. This version bumps the Mithril signer to 1.0.0, marking it as production-ready on the release-mainnet network, adds support for Cardano node v.10.7.1, and includes statically built binaries as well as various bug fixes and improvements.

The team also completed the golden tests for the recursive SNARK circuit prototype and enhanced witness preparation for the non-recursive prover in the STM library. They continued work on implementing a SNARK-friendly protocol message, the data encoding and state-transition tests for the recursive SNARK circuit prototype, and detecting SNARK circuit modifications in the STM library. Additionally, they completed the extraction of the Merkle tree modules into a new crate.

Finally, the team implemented support for multiple tiers of tests in CI, refactored the crates publication, and investigated test flakiness.

VOLTAIRE

Voting in the Intersect election committees concluded on Friday, May 1, at 12 noon UTC. With 105 candidates for 37 available seats, the election was hotly contested. An independent audit has commenced and will continue over the weekend. Results will be announced on Monday, May 4, at noon UTC.

RESEARCH

This week, the research team has submitted their treasury proposal and are preparing their DRep Advocacy campaign, which includes content and events to explain the impact and value of the workstreams in the IOR proposal.


Weekly development report as of 2026-05-01

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.


Weekly development report as of 2026-04-24

CORE TECHNOLOGY

This week, teams at Input Output are finalizing 2026 treasury proposals for continued Cardano development. Nine proposals – spanning core protocol maintenance, consensus, upgrades, scaling, developer experience, smart contracts, and more – support a defined body of work, with clear ownership, timelines, and a direct link to Cardano’s 2030 vision. Once published, they will be accessible for community review and voting.

Starting next week, X Spaces sessions will cover each proposal group and its related development initiatives. Announcements, along with the treasury website launch, will be shared via IO’s X account.

Last week, the consensus team implemented Leios endorser block (EB) inclusion in the consensus layer, adding EB announcement and certification tracking to blocks, along with a SQLite-based backend for querying EBs and certificates (#1921). They also progressed work on UTXO-HD by refactoring database initialization by changing mkOpenState in ImmutableDB and VolatileDB (#1917), and improved performance by caching transaction differences on first execution, addressing a hotspot observed during transaction revalidation on stressed nodes (#1954).

Additionally, the team released ouroboros-consensus v2.0.0.0 and v3.0.0.0, integrated ouroboros-network 1.1.\*, and incorporated the latest consensus packages into cardano-node for the upcoming node v.10.7 release. Finally, they fixed a flaky ChainDB StateMachine test related to iterators (#1948) and updated the consensus documentation by replacing the ‘Introduction’ page with a comprehensive system overview, including a C4 context diagram and clarifications on code organization and era evolution (#1950).

The ledger team focused on preparing for the Cardano node v.10.7.0 release, which includes the fixes and features required for the upcoming Van Rossum hard fork to protocol version 11. They also prepared for a subsequent v.10.7.1 release to address performance issues identified in the ledger component of v.10.7.0.

The team also identified and fixed several issues, primarily in the CDDL specification, supported by the recently integrated AntiGen tool for negative property testing of ledger serialization.

Additionally, the team introduced optimizations that improve chain validation and replay performance, and enhanced the ledger API used by consensus, resulting in clearer and safer boundaries between components.

For CIP-118 (nested transactions), they defined two additional ledger rules, UTXO and UTXOW, enabling transaction processing in the Dijkstra era to account for sub-transactions. For CIP-165 (canonical ledger state), they applied fixes to the constitutional committee representation.

WALLETS AND SERVICES

After supporting the Midnight mainnet launch, the Lace team is now focused on delivering Lace 2.0 for the extension and working on the mobile version.

SMART CONTRACTS

The Cardano High Assurance team delivered a complete formalization of the Cardano Ledger API for Lean 4. Together with the PlutusCore, UPLC, CEK Machine formalization, and the automated formal reasoning backend, Blaster, this gives anyone in the community the ability to express and formally verify smart contracts without needing to write a formal proof.

The team will be working on a set of tutorial examples across several possible use cases to guide any new user through verifying their smart contract.

SCALING

This week, the Mithril team completed several SNARK-related tasks. They created a new module for the recursive SNARK circuit in the STM library, added support for test mode, refactored the bytes codec for forward and backward compatibility, synchronized updates from the non-recursive circuit prototype, prepared a testing plan for the IVC circuit, enhanced witness preparation for the non-recursive prover, and added golden tests for the recursive SNARK circuit prototype.

They also completed partial block range support, security parameter offset signing, and the WASM client implementation for Cardano blocks and transactions. In addition, they continued work on the explorer update and on documenting Cardano block and transaction signatures on the website. The team also progressed the upgrade to Cardano node v.10.7 and completed DMQ node updates to 0.4.1.0 and 0.4.2.0.

Finally, they cross-compiled Windows builds from Linux using Nix, fixed node build failures in Hydra CI, and investigated a stoppage of SNARK aggregator certification on the dev network.

See this technical update for more details.

VOLTAIRE

In the latest news on the Intersect committee elections, candidate applications closed today, Friday, April 17, with more candidates than available seats in all eight committees.

Voting opens on Monday, April 20, and runs until May 1. Each member’s vote carries the same weight, regardless of the amount of ada held. Each member is entitled to one vote for each available seat in each committee. For example, if there are five seats in a committee and seven candidates, a member can select five candidates. The same rules apply to each committee. Members can change their votes at any time until noon UTC on May 1.

To vote, log in to the Intersect members’ area, select ‘Voting events’, and follow the prompts.

RESEARCH

This week, the Research team is proud to announce a new strategic collaboration with the Archimedes Research Unit of the Athena Research Center (Athena RC), in Athens, Greece. This new partnership includes a new blockchain technology laboratory (BTL), which aims to advance research at the intersection of decentralized AI, blockchain, and private healthcare.

The new laboratory will drive research into how blockchain can act as a secure layer for artificial intelligence by merging privacy-enhancing technologies, game theory, and distributed ledgers to decouple data access from data insight. 

We look forward to sharing the innovations that will emerge from this exciting partnership.


Weekly development report as of 2026-04-17

CARDANO HIGH ASSURANCE

This week, the Cardano High Assurance team released a complete formalization of Plutus Core, UPLC, and CEK machine in Lean 4, called PlutusCoreBlaster.

Combined with the automated formal reasoning backend, Blaster, developers can now formally verify that the compiled UPLC of their smart contracts meets the intended business requirements and security objectives.

The team is working hard to deliver a complete set of ledger rules and formalization in Lean 4, making it even easier to formally verify smart contracts through predefined helper functions.

SMART CONTRACTS

The Plutus team delivered a set of improvements to Plinth, focusing on compiler usability and language efficiency.

On the compiler side, they introduced new type checker plugins that preserve source locations and detect unsupported Haskell features, resulting in clearer and more actionable error messages. They also added a driver plugin that automatically applies the required compiler flags and enables the Strict extension.

In terms of language improvements, the team enhanced AsData to generate a destructor function for data types, providing a more efficient approach for matching on sum types compared to pattern synonyms.

Additionally, they implemented a new UPLC optimization, transforming applications with three or more arguments into case-constr form to improve execution efficiency.

Updates to the Plinth user guide are in progress, with further details currently available in the associated pull request descriptions.

SCALING

This week, the Mithril team completed the full review of the recursive SNARK circuit prototype, the impact assessment of SNARK on Mithril protocol security, and support for multiple proof systems in the STM library. They also completed SNARK proof generation and verification in end-to-end tests. They began work on the recursive SNARK circuit, including creating a new module in the STM library, and worked on a testing plan for the IVC circuit and production readiness for circuit keys and trusted setup. They also supported test mode for the recursive circuit and continued refactoring the STM library's byte codec.

Additionally, they completed the client CLI implementation for Cardano blocks and transactions and made progress on partial block range support, security parameter offset signing, and the explorer update for Cardano blocks and transactions.

Finally, the team completed the reqwest upgrade to 0.13 and continued work on the Cardano node upgrade to 10.7 and the DMQ node update to 0.4.1.0.

VOLTAIRE

Only seven days left to apply for the 2026 Intersect committee elections – if you've been thinking about it, now is the time to act.

Whether your background is technical, operational, community-focused, strategic, or regional, your perspective could help strengthen Cardano. Previous committee experience isn’t essential if you’re considering applying. What matters most is a willingness to contribute, collaborate, and help improve the ecosystem.


Weekly development report as of 2026-04-10

CORE TECHNOLOGY

This week, the performance and benchmarking team ran compiler benchmarks on node v.10.6.2 and evaluated new tracing features. They also began developing a new project – tx-centrifuge– a transaction submission service designed to generate extremely high, continuous workloads.

Regarding infrastructure, the team addressed minor maintenance tasks, including fixing profiled Nix builds for local benchmarking. In tracing, they separated the new tracing system into its own project, ‘Hermod Tracing’, and released a new library, cardano-timeseries-io, which accumulates metrics into queryable time series.

For Leios, the cardano-recon-framework (formerly the LTL trace verifier) has now been integrated and is in use. Finally, within node diversity, the formal trace schema definition is nearing merging, while trace forwarding in native Rust remains on hold. 

WALLETS AND SERVICES

Midnight wallet is now available in Lace. This marks a significant milestone for the team, bringing Midnight mainnet access directly into the Lace wallet experience. Users can now create a Midnight wallet, hold Midnight assets, and begin exploring a new model of blockchain privacy alongside their existing Cardano assets.

SCALING

This week, the Mithril team completed wiring the SNARK proof into the aggregate signature and successfully activated the SNARK prover on a developer Mithril network. They also continued the full review of the recursive SNARK circuit prototype, the impact assessment of SNARK on Mithril protocol security, and SNARK proof generation and verification in end-to-end tests.

Additionally, the team completed the implementation of examples for Cardano blocks and transactions and continued progressing the client CLI implementation, partial block range support, and signing of the security parameter offset. They also updated the release process to anticipate unreleased versions of the Cardano node.

Finally, the team removed the legacy v1 Cardano database backend, updated the DMQ node to 0.3.0.0, and continued work on the upgrade to Cardano node v.10.7.

VOLTAIRE

Applications for the 2026 Intersect committee elections are open now and close on April 17 — so if you've been weighing it up, this is the moment to act. Five seats are available across each of seven standing committees, covering budget, civics, growth and marketing, membership and community, open source, product, and technical steering, plus two seats on the Intersect steering committee itself. Each committee plays a genuine advisory role in shaping how Cardano evolves, and a two-year term means your contribution will have real depth and continuity.

If you're still unsure whether you're the right fit, each committee is hosting both an X Space and a Virtual Hub session before the deadline — a chance to hear directly from current members, ask questions, and get a clearer sense of where your skills belong. Find and register for all sessions via the Luma calendar at luma.com/intersect-committee-elections. Full details on available seats and how to apply are on the Intersect Knowledge Base.

RESEARCH

Read more about IOR’s Professor Aggelos Kiayias, 2026 IACR Fellow, in the latest blog post.


Weekly development report as of 2026-04-03

CORE TECHNOLOGY

Over the past few weeks, the networking team supported the upcoming node v.10.7.0 release and released the new versions of ouroboros-network and cardano-diffusion.

For Leios, work remained in progress on mux egress prioritization, transaction submission v2 performance improvements and demo, and updates to the network section.

Across ouroboros-network, the team enhanced transaction submission robustness and testing, refactored the mux and socket API, added new type data to ledger peers, and made various tooling and documentation enhancements.

On the DMQ node, they completed work on signature submission v2, ledger peer integration, dependency updates, documentation improvements, and released dmq-node 0.3.0.0 pre-release. Integration with cardano-tracer remains in progress.

Finally, IOSim saw multiple improvements, including event log handling, broader cleanup, and added support for GHC 9.14.

The consensus team worked on Peras protocol development by reviewing and merging the implementation of the committee selection model, which defines how voters are chosen for fast-finality voting rounds. They also merged the node implementation that enables tracking Peras certificate progress on-chain, supporting the protocol’s chain-selection rule.

Additionally, the team released ouroboros-consensus v.1.0.0.0 and reworked internal resource management for ledger state access, improving node robustness. Finally, they fixed a minor issue in the immutable DB chunk enumeration logic affecting test coverage and integrated the networking team’s ouroboros-network v.1.0 release (#1918, #1927, #1929).

SMART CONTRACTS

This week, the Cardano High Assurance team went to Buidler Fest in Buenos Aires, organized by TxPipe. The team demonstrated the latest features of the automated formal verification tool and the coming-soon Plinth static analyzer.

SCALING

This week, the Mithril team completed several SNARK-related milestones: they finished implementing the Halo2 circuit in the STM library, completed work on SNARK aggregation primitives for creating and verifying SNARK proofs, and finalized circuit refactoring, including modularity enhancements and a switch to a transcript hash function. They also completed the technical report for the recursive Halo2 circuit. The team continued work on the full review of the recursive SNARK circuit prototype, the impact assessment of SNARK on Mithril protocol security, wiring the SNARK proof into the aggregate signature, and activating the SNARK prover in the dev networks.

They also completed implementing the new prover for Cardano blocks and transactions, the client library, and enhanced the signed entity type configuration. They continued progressing on the client CLI implementation, partial block range support, and usage examples for Cardano blocks and transactions. Additionally, they kept working on the release process improvements, the removal of the legacy Cardano database backend in the client, and the enhancement of the protocol security page on the website.

Finally, they completed static builds of Mithril nodes in CI, finalized testing of the DMQ node 0.3.0 pre-release, and updated the Midnight ZK library audit status.

The Hydra team continued progress on the partial fanout feature (#1667, #2538) and made some final changes to the directly open heads feature. They also investigated a blocker encountered during the upgrade to cardano-api v.10.21 and worked on improving snapshot resilience.

VOLTAIRE

With Intersect committee elections coming soon, now is a great time to start thinking about where you could make the most impact. Which areas of Cardano's future matter most to you – governance, budget, technical direction, ecosystem growth? There's a committee for that. 

Applications open March 30 through April 17, so take a moment to reflect on where your skills and passion align, and consider putting your name forward.

If standing for election isn't for you right now, think about who in your network might be the perfect fit. Great committees are built from great people, and you might know exactly the right one.

RESEARCH

IOR’s Professor Aggelos Kiayias has been named a 2026 Fellow of the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR). He is being awarded ‘for outstanding contributions to cryptographic designs, including the science and implementations of blockchains, for educational leadership, and for service to the IACR’.

The IACR is the global authority on the science of cryptology. To be named a Fellow is to join the ranks of the visionaries who built the protocols securing the modern internet. For Professor Kiayias, this recognition is a testament to a lifelong commitment to provable security. This IACR Fellowship recognizes the profound impact Professor Kiayias has had across the cryptographic landscape, most notably in the evolution of decentralized networks. 

The IOR team is also progressing on Work Package 2026 workstreams and writing accessible explainers to accompany some of the research papers.


Weekly development report as of 2026-03-27

CORE TECHNOLOGY

Over the past few weeks, the ledger team has progressed work on nested transactions by implementing an additional ledger rule. They also integrated the new testing library AntiGen into the ledger, enabling negative property testing of decoders against the CDDL specification. This improves confidence in the quality of binary decoders, both for current and future eras.

The team also progressed work on the canonical ledger state by adding one more namespace.

Finally, they reached a major milestone by releasing all ledger packages to CHaP for the upcoming cardano-node v.10.7 release, which includes the features required for the intra-era hard fork to protocol version 11.

SCALING

Mithril

This week, the Mithril team continued implementing new succinct proofs. They completed the certificate chain adaptation for the SNARK aggregate verification key, prepared the SNARK prover witness, and finalized the naming alignment as part of the SNARK circuit refactoring. They published a new dev blog detailing protocol parameter changes on mainnet. The team also continued work on modularity enhancements using gadgets and on SNARK proof verification. In addition, they advanced the full review of the recursive circuit prototype, the technical report for the recursive Halo2 circuit, and the impact assessment of SNARK on the Mithril protocol's security.

The team also continued work on the new certification for Cardano blocks and transactions, including the prover and client library implementations, completed static builds for Mithril nodes, and began enhancing support for signed entity types through configuration.

Finally, they continued testing the DMQ node 0.3.0 pre-release and worked on removing the v1 backend for the Cardano database in the client library and CLI.

Hydra

The Hydra team released version 1.3.0 and made substantial progress on the partial fanout feature (#1667, #2538). They also fixed an issue related to the high layer 2 transaction load and improved logging when running smoke tests.

Next, the team focuses on improving the structure and consistency of benchmarks to support more reliable performance analysis. They are also working on the upcoming Dijkstra era and implementing the ‘directly open heads’ feature. Finally, the team plans to upgrade to cardano-api v.10.21.


Weekly development report as of 2026-03-20

ECOSYSTEM UPDATES

The information in this section is based on publicly available sources and is provided for informational purposes only. It does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation of any project, product, or service mentioned.

This week in ecosystem updates:

Binance listed the NIGHT token this week and conducted an airdrop to BNB holders

The Sandstone stake pool team released Torsten, a Cardano full node written in Rust that could lower resource usage, provide faster chain syncing, and reduce hardware costs

Cardano will be a block sponsor at Consensus 2026, taking place May 5–7, 2026, in Miami

Zero deposit fees for the USDC → USDCx deposit and relay services have been extended.

CORE TECHNOLOGY

Over the past few weeks, the consensus team continued work on the Leios prototype as part of Treasury Funding Initiative 4 (Ouroboros Leios implementation). They implemented a run-threadnet CLI that allows configuring, running, and observing simulated Cardano networks. This tool enables quick local testing of multi-node setups and speeds up the investigation of implementation issues. The team also drafted a baseline design for the Leios fetch logic with bounded memory usage, addressing the challenge of efficiently fetching and managing large volumes of data while keeping resource usage within practical limits. Work will continue with an exploration of alternative storage strategies to further improve performance.

In Peras development, the team added state-machine tests for the Peras vote database, strengthening guarantees around the correctness of the voting mechanism.

They also delivered several node improvements as part of Treasury Funding Initiative 17 (maintenance and support). The node-to-client protocol was updated to version 23, unlocking new queries for wallets and other tools interacting with the node. The team also simplified the process for developers to target the current era when querying the node, improved observability of chain selection by exposing the reasons behind chain switches, and integrated a ledger fix for a bug in the Plutus script context.

Work also progressed on repository and tooling improvements. The team unified all consensus packages into a single package to simplify dependencies for downstream projects and enhanced the snapshot converter tool with a daemon mode that watches for new ledger snapshots and converts them automatically, which is useful for node operators managing different storage backends. The team also added developer documentation for inspecting a node’s chain.

Finally, testing and quality improvements included generalizing Genesis tests to support any block type, paving the way for conformance testing with real Cardano blocks, adding support for GHC 9.14, and internal cleanup of chain selection and ledger database code.

WALLETS AND SERVICES 

The Lace team is currently focused on supporting the upcoming Midnight mainnet launch, bringing rational privacy directly into the wallet experience. As the first wallet to integrate Midnight, Lace will give Cardano users secure, non-custodial access to Midnight assets alongside their existing holdings. This milestone introduces a new model in which public and private assets can coexist seamlessly within a single familiar interface, with Lace continuing to evolve alongside the Midnight ecosystem.

SMART CONTRACTS

This week, the Cardano High Assurance team worked on the automated formal verification tool, focusing on implementing correct costing for the CEK machine used in formal verification. They also extended and improved the set of optimization rules, achieving a significant reduction in processing time. This brings the tool close to proving complex smart contracts directly at the UPLC level. The team plans to demonstrate its features at Buidler Fest this March.

For the property-based testing tool, the team focused on integrating the solution’s core components: a testing interface for generating complex test scenarios, a threat model that automatically explores known weaknesses, and a comprehensive set of examples showcasing the tool’s capabilities.

Finally, the team continued preparing the first release of the static analysis tool for Plinth smart contracts. They implemented an initial set of rules and developed a Visual Studio Code extension. Work now focuses on finalizing the release and making the tool available to Plinth developers.

SCALING

This week, the Mithril team continued implementing new succinct proofs. The team completed the SNARK pre-aggregation primitives in the STM library, began preparing the SNARK prover witness, and continued adapting the certificate chain for SNARK AVK. They also made significant progress on the SNARK circuit refactoring, completing the error handling and type consistency tasks while continuing work on decoupling the Midnight library and aligning naming. In addition, they refactored the prototype recursive circuit's state transition functions and continued the full review of the recursive circuit prototype, the technical report for the recursive Halo2 circuit, and the impact assessment of SNARK on Mithril protocol security.

The team also continued work on the new certification for Cardano blocks and transactions, including the prover and the client library implementation. They completed the integration of Mithril explainers into the Cardano Developer Portal website and continued work on static builds for Mithril nodes.

Finally, they fixed a slowness issue affecting the import of Cardano blocks and transactions on dev aggregators, improved the DMQ node setup documentation, and tested the DMQ node 0.3.0 pre-release.

VOLTAIRE

Intersect is preparing to facilitate the committee elections. Candidate applications will open on March 30, 2026, and close on April 17, with voting taking place from April 20 to May 1. Committee seats carry two-year terms, with elections held annually so that roughly half of each standing committee's membership rotates each year — preserving institutional knowledge and cultural continuity across cycles.

RESEARCH 

This week, the Input Output Research (IOR) team is reviewing submissions received for the cryptographic tools workshop, affiliated with Eurocrypt 2026, in May.


Weekly development report as of 2026-03-13

ECOSYSTEM UPDATES

The information in this section is based on publicly available sources and is provided for informational purposes only. It does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation of any project, product, or service mentioned.

This week in ecosystem updates:

Ada will now be accepted as a payment method in 137 SPAR stores across Switzerland

Cardano Buidler Fest will take place in Argentina on March 24–25

Bodega Labs will launch a fully private prediction market on Midnight Network

Danogo announced plans to launch a USDCx lending pool

Cardano Foundation’s Reeve will be integrated into BlockSign, enabling one-click publishing of proof of reserves on Cardano.

CORE TECHNOLOGY

This week, the ledger team conducted additional testing and fixed several minor bugs. They also implemented further restructuring of the ledger state to improve performance and simplify the ongoing ledger HD implementation. Finally, they progressed with nested transactions – defining two major ledger rules to process sub-transactions, and with canonical ledger state – implementing two additional namespaces.

WALLETS AND SERVICES 

The Lace team is currently supporting the Midnight mainnet release. 

They are also advancing LaceID – a native identity feature within the Lace wallet. LaceID will enable users to manage verifiable credentials alongside native assets and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in a single, trusted environment. LaceID is currently in development and is in its first phase of the roadmap – proof of humanity. Follow these updates to learn more as development progresses.

Finally, the team continues work on the mobile application development.

SCALING

This week, the Mithril team continued implementing new succinct proofs. They completed signer authentication for SNARK verification keys, calibrated precision for lottery target value computation, and aligned domain separation tags as part of the SNARK circuit refactoring. Progress also continued on SNARK pre-aggregation primitives, improved error handling within the refactored circuit, the full review of the recursive circuit prototype, and the technical report for the recursive Halo2 circuit.

Additionally, the team finalized proof routes for Cardano blocks and transactions in the aggregator REST API and continued preparations for the next distribution release. They advanced the integration of Mithril into the Cardano Developer documentation site, added support for upgrading the Cardano node without requiring a new Mithril distribution, and completed the upgrade to Cardano node v.10.6.

Finally, they fixed a performance regression in the transaction proof route and worked on a slow import issue on dev aggregators.

VOLTAIRE

The Intersect committee elections for 2026 have been announced. Applications to stand for election will open at the end of March.

RESEARCH 

This week, the Input Output Research (IOR) team presented two papers at Financial Cryptography 2026. 

The ‘Incentivizing Geographic Diversity for Decentralized Systems’ paper establishes a formal model to assess geographic diversity and proposes a game-theoretic framework to incentivize greater decentralization in networks. Geographic centralization makes systems vulnerable to regional disasters, attacks, or political crackdowns. The authors designed a system that rewards people for setting up nodes in underrepresented areas and more diverse locations while using round-trip time measurements to ensure those nodes are indeed reporting their true physical location.

The paper ‘On Sybil-proofness in Restaking Networks’ was presented at the associated 5th Workshop on Decentralized Finance (DeFi). This paper addressed how restaking allows one person to use the same deposit to secure multiple services, but this creates a risk where they can hide their identity to avoid being punished for bad behavior. The research shows that it is mathematically impossible to design a penalty system that simultaneously prevents all types of hidden-identity attacks.

The proposal submission date has been extended to March 9, 2026, for the cryptographic tools for the blockchain workshop, affiliated with Eurocrypt 2026, in May.

The team also published a blog about building Midnight on peer-reviewed foundations.


Weekly development report as of 2026-03-06

ECOSYSTEM UPDATES

The information in this section is based on publicly available sources and is provided for informational purposes only. It does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation of any project, product, or service mentioned.

This week in ecosystem updates:

MoneyGram is now a federated node operator for Midnight Network

The Yoroi staking pool will offer dual rewards, allowing stakers to earn night tokens alongside ada

The Cardano Foundation will assume stewardship of Project Catalyst going forward

The Pyth and Cardano hackathon will take place in Argentina in March

COTI Network will collaborate with Artifi Labs to support the long-term development of Djed stablecoin.

CORE TECHNOLOGY

This week, the performance and benchmarking team released benchmarks for node versions 10.5.4 and 10.6.2, including parallel GC benchmarks, and prepared a new PlutusV3 baseline. The performance cluster now has a custom, isolated Nix cache to ensure safe benchmarking of security-critical changes. They also improved tracing robustness by forcing lazy values in controlled sections of code. In Leios, the LTL Trace Verifier is complete and awaiting integration. For node diversity, the formal trace schema definition has entered the validation phase, while trace forwarding in native Rust is moving into testing. For more details, see this technical update.

SCALING

This week, the Mithril team continued implementing new succinct proofs. They completed the lottery target value computation for SNARK, updated protocol parameters to SNARK-friendly values, prepared the SNARK circuit refactoring, and removed the off-circuit module from the Halo2 circuit. Work also progressed on SNARK pre-aggregation primitives, signer authentication for SNARK, the full review of the recursive circuit prototype, and the technical report for the recursive Halo2 circuit.

Additionally, the team advanced the new certification for Cardano blocks and transactions, implementing the transaction membership prover and proof routes in the aggregator REST API. Preparation for the 2608 distribution release also began.

Finally, they fixed a bug caused by a breaking change in the snapshot converter for Cardano node v.10.6.2 and resolved flaky unit tests in the SNARK circuit.

The Hydra team focused on stability, correctness, and improved diagnostics. They resolved several consensus-related issues, including a race condition affecting decommits, a stuck-node scenario around commits, and an infinite AckSn loop linked to commit and decommit handling. The team also fixed a bug involving deposits and chain rollbacks, addressed user-reported issues related to contract computation time on the hydra-node, and improved error reporting for missing script witnesses, making troubleshooting more straightforward. Logging around chain synchronization status was enhanced to provide clearer operational visibility.

Finally, the team made great progress on the partial fanout development. 

The Leios team held their February monthly review session, focusing on enhancing Cardano’s blockchain throughput. They presented a working prototype capable of producing endorser blocks and handling high transaction loads within a simulated network. Critical design discussions addressed resource management, balancing memory and disk usage to ensure Leios did not compromise the existing Ouroboros Praos security model. The team also reviewed sophisticated testing frameworks, including deterministic simulations, to evaluate network behavior under fault and adversarial conditions. The update concluded with formal cryptographic specifications and new voting models to maintain protocol integrity as the project progresses toward a public testnet.

RESEARCH 

The Input Output Research (IOR) team is accepting proposals for the cryptographic tools for the blockchain workshop, affiliated with Eurocrypt 2026, in May. Proposal submissions remain open on the CTB website until February 27.



エコシステム

本セクションの情報は、一般に利用可能な情報源に基づいており、情報提供のみを目的として提供されています。言及されているプロジェクト、製品、サービスを推奨するものではありません。

今週のエコシステム更新情報

MoneyGramがMidnightネットワークの連合型ノードオペレーターに

Yoroiステークプールが二重報酬を提供、ADAとNIGHTトークンの同時獲得が可能に

Cardano財団ががProject Catalystの運営を継承

PythとCardanoのハッカソン、アルゼンチンで3月開催

COTI NetworkがArtifi LabsとDjedステーブルコインの長期開発で提携

コアテクノロジー

パフォーマンス&ベンチマークチームは、並列GCベンチマークを含むノードバージョン10.5.4および10.6.2のベンチマークをリリースし、PlutusV3の新しいベースラインを準備しました。パフォーマンスクラスターには、セキュリティ上重要な変更のベンチマークを安全に行うため、隔離されたカスタムのNixキャッシュが導入されました。制御されたコードセクションで遅延評価を強制することにより、トレーシングの堅牢性を向上させました。Leiosでは、LTLトレース検証器が完成し、統合を待っています。ノードの多様性については、形式的なトレーススキーマ定義が検証フェーズに入り、Rustネイティブによるトレース転送はテスト段階に移行しています。詳細はテクニカル更新情報をご覧ください。

スケーリング

Mithrilチームは新しい簡潔な証明の実装を続けました。SNARK用の抽選ターゲット値計算を完了し、プロトコルパラメーターをSNARK適正値へ更新し、SNARK回路のリファクタリングを準備し、Halo2回路からオフサーキットモジュールを削除しました。SNARKの集約前プリミティブ、SNARK用の署名者認証、再帰的回路プロトタイプのフルレビュー、再帰的Halo2回路に関するテクニカルレポートの作成も進展しました。

Cardanoのブロックおよびトランザクションに関する新しい認証に関する作業も進展しており、アグリゲーターREST APIに、トランザクションメンバーシッププルーバーおよび証明ルートを実装しました。2608ディストリビューションリリースの準備も開始しました。

Cardanoノードv.10.6.2のスナップショットコンバーターにおける破壊的変更に起因するバグを修正し、SNARK回路の不安定なユニットテストも解決しました。

Hydraチームは、安定性、正確性、診断機能の改善に注力しました。デコミットに影響を与える競合状態や、コミット周りでノードが停止するシナリオなど、コンセンサス関連の複数の課題を解決した他、コミットおよびデコミットの処理に関連するAckSnの無限ループ問題も解消しました。デポジットとチェーンロールバックに関するバグを修正し、ユーザーから報告されたhydra-node上でのコントラクトの計算時間に関する不具合に対処し、トラブルシューティングを明確化することによってwitnessスクリプト欠如時のエラー報告を改善しました。チェーン同期ステータスに関するロギングを強化し、運用の可視性を向上させました。

部分的ファンアウトの開発も大きく進展しています。 

Leiosチームは、Cardanoのスループット向上に焦点を当てた2月の月例レビューセッションを開催しました。シミュレーションネットワークでエンドーサーブロックを生成し、高負荷のトランザクションを処理できる動作プロトタイプを提示しました。設計議論では、既存のOuroboros Praosのセキュリティモデルを損なうことのないようにメモリーとディスク使用量のバランスをとるリソース管理に焦点が当てられました。決定論的シミュレーションを含む高度なテストフレームワークを検討し、障害発生時や敵対的な条件下でのネットワークの挙動評価を行いました。セッションの締めくくりとして、パブリックテストネットに向けた、プロトコルの整合性を維持するための形式的な暗号仕様や新しい投票モデルが提示されました。

研究 

\*\*Input Output Research（IOR）\*\*チームは、5月に開催されるEurocrypt 2026に併設されるブロックチェーンワークショップのための暗号ツールの提案を受付中です。提案の提出はCTBのウェブサイトで2月27日まで受け付けています。


Weekly development report as of 2026-02-27

ECOSYSTEM UPDATES

The information in this section is based on publicly available sources and is provided for informational purposes only. It does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation of any project, product, or service mentioned.

This week in ecosystem updates:

Blockdaemon is now a Midnight federated mainnet validator

Catch up on all the announcements made at Consensus Hong Kong

The Cardano Foundation and Paris Blockchain Week announced the ‘Institutional Adoption Track’ of the ‘Start In Block’ startup competition, targeting blockchain startups focused on enterprise-scale solutions

Coinbase expands on-chain loans to include ADA, XRP, and LTC as collateral

Messari releases the State of Cardano Q4 2025 report.

CORE TECHNOLOGY

This week, the core technology teams released node v.10.6.2, focusing on structural improvements, tracing enhancements, and preparation for upcoming protocol upgrades.

The release further strengthens the new tracing system, improving observability and diagnostics across components. It also removes the legacy networking stack, simplifying the architecture and reducing technical debt, and introduces a major refactor of the API module structure to improve long-term maintainability.

Additionally, foundational work was added to support the upcoming intra-era hard fork (protocol version 11) and the future Dijkstra era (protocol version 12), preparing the node for the next phase of protocol evolution.

Additional highlights include expanded Plutus built-in functionality scheduled for activation in protocol version 11, stability improvements across networking and mempool handling, CLI updates including transaction fee estimation, and arm64 support for release artifacts and OCI images.

See release notes for more details.

The ledger team resolved several issues required for Cardano node v.10.6.2 release and focused on preparations for Cardano node v.10.7.0 release and the intra-era hard fork to protocol version 11. 

The team also continued work on CIP-118 (nested transactions), including formalizing ledger rules for sub-transactions and restructuring UTXO update handling to support this functionality. They completed renaming for CIP-159 (account address enhancement, phase one) to reflect the promotion of reward accounts to full accounts, and introduced a new ‘balance intervals’ field in the transaction body.

Finally, work on CIP-165 (canonical ledger state) progressed, with three namespaces implemented, which establishes the structural foundation for the broader canonical ledger state framework.

SCALING

This week, the Mithril team focused on implementing new succinct proofs. The team worked on pre-aggregation SNARK primitives in the STM library, completed bridging between CPU and circuit implementations, and worked on lottery target pre-computation. They also continued to adapt the certificate chain for SNARK-friendliness and to implement signer authentication for SNARK verification keys.

Additionally, the team continued work on the new certification for Cardano blocks and transactions. This included implementing the prover, proof routes in the aggregator REST API, and the diffusion of the signing configuration.

Finally, they continued working on static builds for Mithril nodes, fixed some CI bugs, and implemented support for Cardano node v.10.6.2.

The Hydra team relaunched monthly Hydra working group sessions with a stronger focus on real-world users and production feedback. The core team shared updates on the upcoming v.1.3 release, including fee calculation fixes, snapshot improvements, memory optimizations, and progress on partial fan-out.

Key use cases, including DeltaDeFi and Masumi, presented their experience using Hydra as a scaling solution. Production hardening and developer experience improvements were identified as the key focus areas for the next iteration. 

The Leios team made steady progress on both prototype implementation and parameter consolidation:

The prototype is now minting and diffusing endorser blocks (EBs) — including large blocks with hundreds of transactions — under mempool load in a three-node protodevnet setup. The Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) trace verifier is production-ready and will be integrated into the demo. A dedicated session was held to define key verification properties, with stable operation targeted by the end of the month.

Architecture refinements: the C4 model, a popular way to visualize and document software architecture, was updated to include explicit state tracking for announcement flows, supporting equivocation detection and deduplication. For security, the EB store must retain all known but not yet certified EBs in volatile storage. Even in worst-case scenarios, volatile storage requirements remain manageable at tens of gigabytes over a 36-hour window. An immutable and volatile storage split is recommended to optimize disk usage.

On the research side, the team conducted combinatorial analysis and realistic network simulations to study mempool fragmentation and transaction propagation under overload, including regular random and expander graph topologies. This work is being aligned with the mempool inconsistency model and the optimistic performance analysis, with particular focus on transaction retention time. The team remains on track to deliver a joint summary document in early March that consolidates findings on safe protocol parameters.

Overall, the prototype demonstrates clear end-to-end behavior, while research and modeling efforts are rapidly converging.

VOLTAIRE

Intersect is gearing up for committee elections in April. Applications open in March — keep an eye out for more details soon.

RESEARCH 

The Input Output Research (IOR) team is planning the cryptographic tools for the blockchain workshop, affiliated with Eurocrypt 2026, in May. This workshop aims to bring together researchers working on cryptographic problems in different ecosystems to discuss the latest approaches and results. Proposal submissions remain open on the CTB website until February 27.



エコシステム

本セクションの情報は、一般に利用可能な情報源に基づいており、情報提供のみを目的として提供されています。言及されているプロジェクト、製品、サービスを推奨するものではありません。

今週のエコシステム更新情報

BlockdaemonがMidnightの連合型メインネットバリデーターに

香港Consensusで発表された全告知

Cardano財団とParis Blockchain Weekは、スタートアップコンペティションのStart In Blockで、企業規模のソリューションに焦点を当てたブロックチェーンスタートアップを対象としたInstitutional Adoption（機関採用）トラックを発表

Coinbaseがオンチェーンローンを拡張し、ADA、XRP、LTCをコラテラルに追加

MessariがCardanoの現状：2025年第4四半期レポートを公開

コアテクノロジー

コアテクノロジーチームはCardanoノードv.10.6.2をリリースしました。このリリースでは、構造的な改善、トレーシング機能の強化、今後のプロトコルアップグレードへの準備に焦点を当てています。

このリリースにより新しいトレーシングシステムがさらに強化され、各コンポーネントにおける可観測性と診断機能が向上しました。レガシーネットワークスタックを削除することでアーキテクチャーを簡素化して技術負債を削減し、APIモジュール構造の大規模なリファクタリングを実施して長期的な保守性を高めました。

次回の開発期内ハードフォーク（プロトコルバージョン11）および将来のDijkstra期（プロトコルバージョン12）をサポートするための基礎作業を追加し、プロトコル進化の次段階に向けた準備を整えました。

その他のハイライトとして、バージョン11で有効化予定のPlutus組み込み機能の拡張、ネットワークおよびメモリープール処理の安定性向上、トランザクション手数料見積もりを含むCLIの更新、arm64サポートが挙げられます。

詳細はリリースノートをご覧ください。

台帳チームは、Cardanoノードv.10.6.2のリリースに必要な諸問題を解決し、ノードv.10.7.0およびプロトコルバージョン11への開発期内ハードフォークに向けた準備に注力しました。 

CIP-118（ネストされたトランザクション）に関する作業を継続し、サブトランザクションのための台帳ルールの形式化や、この機能をサポートするためのUTXO更新処理の再構築を行いました。CIP-159（アカウントアドレス強化フェーズ1）に関連して、報酬アカウントをフルアカウントへ昇格させることに伴う名称変更を完了し、トランザクションボディに新たに‘balance intervals’フィールドを導入しました。

CIP-165（標準台帳状態）の作業が進展しました。ここでは3つの名前空間を実装して、より広範な標準台帳状態フレームワークの構造的基盤を確立しました。

スケーリング

Mithrilチームは新しい簡潔な証明の実装に注力しました。STMライブラリーにおける集約前SNARKプリミティブに取り組み、CPU実装と回路実装のブリッジ作業を完了し、抽選ターゲットの事前計算にも着手しました。SNARKとの親和性を高めるための証明書チェーンの適応作業や、SNARK検証鍵のための署名者認証の実装も継続しています。

Cardanoブロックおよびトランザクションのための新しい認証に関する作業を継続しました。具体的には、証明者、アグリゲーターREST APIにおける証明ルート、署名設定の伝播機能の実装などが挙げられます。

Mithrilノードの静的ビルド、CIバグの修正、Cardanoノードv.10.6.2のサポートを実装しました。

Hydraチームは、実際のユーザーや本番環境からのフィードバックへ改めて重点を置きながら、月例のHydraワーキンググループセッションを再開しました。コアチームは、手数料計算の修正、スナップショットの改善、メモリー最適化、部分的なファンアウトの進捗など、次期v.1.3リリースの更新情報を共有しました。

DeltaDeFiやMasumiといった主要なユースケースにおける、スケーリングソリューションとしてのHydraの使用経験が発表されました。次のイテレーションの主要な重点分野として、本番環境での堅牢化と開発者エクスペリエンスの向上が特定されました。 

Leiosチームは、プロトタイプ実装とパラメーターの集約の両面で着実に進展しました。

3ノードのプロトタイプ開発ネット環境にて、メモリープールに負荷がかかった状態で、数百のトランザクションを含む大きなブロックを持つエンドーサーブロック（EB）のミントと伝播に成功しました。LTL（線形時相論理）トレース検証ツールが本番利用可能な状態となりました。これは、デモに統合される予定です。主要な検証プロパティを定義するための専用セッションが開催され、今月末までの安定稼働を目指しています。

アーキテクチャーの精査：ソフトウェアアーキテクチャーを視覚化および文書化する一般的な方法であるC4モデルを更新し、アナウンスメントフローに明示的な状態追跡を追加して、二重署名の検出と重複排除をサポートしました。セキュリティ上の理由から、EBストアは未認証の既知の全EBを揮発性ストレージに保持する必要があります。最悪のシナリオでも、36時間のウィンドウで数十GB程度という管理可能な範囲に収まります。ディスク使用量最適化のため、不変ストレージと揮発性ストレージの分割が推奨されています。

研究に関しては、組合せ分析と現実的なネットワークシミュレーションを実施し、正則ランダムグラフやエキスパンダーグラフといったトポロジーを用いて、過負荷時におけるメモリープールの断片化とトランザクション伝播を調査しました。この作業は、メモリープールの不整合モデルや楽観的パフォーマンス分析と整合を図っており、特にトランザクションの保持時間に焦点を当てています。安全なプロトコルパラメーターに関する知見をまとめた共同サマリー文書は、3月上旬の提供予定に向けて順調に進んでいます。

プロトタイプは一連の動作が設計通りに機能することを実証しており、研究とモデリングの取り組みは急速に収束しつつあります。

VOLTAIRE

Intersectは、4月に開催される委員会選挙の準備を進めています。3月より立候補の受付が開始されますので、今後の更新情報にご注目ください。

研究 

\*\*Input Output Research（IOR）\*\*チームは、5月に開催されるEurocrypt 2026に併設されるブロックチェーンワークショップのための暗号ツールの計画を進めています。このワークショップは、異なるエコシステムで暗号に関する問題に取り組む研究者を集め、最新のアプローチや結果について議論することを目的としています。提案の提出はCTBのウェブサイトで2月27日まで受け付けています。


Weekly development report as of 2026-02-20

ECOSYSTEM UPDATES

The information in this section is based on publicly available sources and is provided for informational purposes only. It does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation of any project, product, or service mentioned.

This week in ecosystem updates:

Midnight Network has announced that its mainnet launch is scheduled for the end of March 2026; also, keep an eye on the upcoming Midnight city simulation

LayerZero integration is coming to Cardano, enabling connectivity to more than 150 blockchains

CswapDEX is rolling out native Bitcoin staking on the public testnet

Cardano is participating in the Africa Tech Summit this week – read the highlights here

Amplify Cardano is sponsoring five booths for five projects at RareEvo, offering Web3 developers an opportunity to showcase their work.

CORE TECHNOLOGY

Over the past few weeks, the networking team focused on enhancing the robustness of the diffusion layer by releasing Cardano node v.10.5.4, which includes essential patches following the November incident. They also optimized connectivity for peers behind firewalls and implemented support for WASM. Additionally, the team improved diffusion stability by enforcing a maximum number of reconnection attempts and adjusting ChainSync timeouts for trusted local root peers. They progressed on Leios development by creating a network mux demo and simulations to analyze traffic alongside Praos. The team further enhanced the dmq-node by moving it to a dedicated repository, refining validation logic, and fixing mempool bugs. Finally, they addressed technical debt by removing duplicate trace events and implementing networking adjustments for the new tracing system.

The consensus team continued working on node v.10.7 integration, integrated network packages up to ouroboros-network-0.22.6 (#1819; #1865), incorporated the latest ledger changes, and integrated kes-agent-1.1. As part of the node maintenance and support initiative, the team also delivered several node improvements. They enhanced observability by exposing the reason for chain switches in the ChainSel tracer, added support for the new GetDRepDelegations ledger state query in NodeToClientV\_23, and fixed an exception caused by a resource mix-up in the V2 LedgerDB. Additional updates include minor code cleanup and new documentation clarifying the consensus and ledger interaction.

Finally, the team continued developing the Leios prototype: they refactored the design to use EbHash instead of EbId, simplified the codebase to monomorphic types to enable faster iteration, and implemented an in-memory LeiosDb to support ThreadNet tests.

SCALING

This week, the Mithril team focused on implementing new succinct proofs. The team worked on pre-aggregation SNARK primitives in the STM library, completed golden master tests for the non-recursive SNARK circuit, and worked on bridging CPU and circuit implementations. They also began adapting the certificate chain for SNARK-friendliness.

Additionally, the team continued work on the new certification for Cardano blocks and transactions. This included implementing the signable builder, along with the artifact and proof routes in the aggregator REST API.

Finally, they worked on static builds for Mithril nodes and fixed bugs in the hash-to-curve implementation of the Schnorr signature.

The Leios team continued steady progress across research, simulation, and tooling.

They proposed producing a concise joint summary report, targeted for early March, to reconcile protocol parameter findings from mainnet measurements, the TypeScript simulator, mathematical models, delta-Q analysis, and prior research, with the goal of aligning recommendations.

Work advanced on Leios-related components in the TypeScript simulator, with a demo expected shortly. In parallel, the team developed a supporting tool to reverse-engineer on-chain DApps by decompiling UPLC to Aiken and using a large language model to infer readable variable names.

They also progressed documentation and development tracker consolidation, refined the migration plan, and collaborated across research, engineering, and web teams to resolve outstanding technical questions and confirm migration timelines.

Following the February 10 working session, they completed the safety property statement and initiated the corresponding proof. Additional updates included formalizing sort-voting and certificate processes, clarifying the feta-comply method, extending the TypeScript MEV simulation with a simplified EBS model, and advancing Antithesis testing infrastructure using instrumented Go-based Leios demo nodes.

RESEARCH 

The Input Output Research (IOR) team is focused on Work Package 26 planning and reviewing proposal submissions.

They are also planning the cryptographic tools for the blockchain workshop, affiliated with Eurocrypt 2026, in May. This workshop aims to bring together researchers working on cryptographic problems in different ecosystems to discuss the latest approaches and results. Proposal submissions remain open until February 27 on the CTB website.



エコシステム

本セクションの情報は、一般に利用可能な情報源に基づいており、情報提供のみを目的として提供されています。言及されているプロジェクト、製品、サービスを推奨するものではありません。

今週のエコシステム更新情報

Midnight Networkは、メインネットローンチを2026年3月末に予定していると発表、また、来るMidnightシティシミュレーションにも注目

LayerZeroがCardano統合へ、150を超えるブロックチェーンとの接続が可能に

CswapDEXがパブリックテストネットでのネイティブビットコインステーキングを展開

Cardanoは今週Africa Tech Summitに参加 - ハイライトはこちら

Amplify CardanoがRareEvoで5つのプロジェクトのための5つのブースを後援、Web3開発者に成果を披露する機会を提供 

コアテクノロジー

ここ数週間、ネットワーキングチームは伝播層の堅牢性強化に注力しており、11月のインシデントを受けた必須パッチを含むCardanoノードv.10.5.4をリリースしました。ファイアウォールの背後にあるピアの接続性を最適化し、WASMのサポートを実装しました。再接続試行回数に上限を設け、信頼されたローカルルートピアのChainSyncタイムアウトを調整することで、伝播の安定性を向上させました。Leiosの開発も進展しています。Praosと並行してトラフィックを分析するためのネットワークmuxデモとシミュレーションを作成しました。dmq-nodeを専用リポジトリに移行し、検証ロジックを改良し、メモリープールのバグを修正することで、その機能を強化しました。重複するトレースイベントを削除し、新しいトレーシングシステム向けにネットワーク調整を行うことで、技術負債に対処しました。

コンセンサスチームは、ノードv.10.7の統合に向けた作業を継続し、ouroboros-network-0.22.6までのネットワークパッケージを統合し（#1819、 #1865）、最新の台帳の変更を取り入れ、kes-agent-1.1を統合しました。ノードのメンテナンスおよびサポートイニシアチブの一環として、ノードの改良も行いました。具体的には、ChainSelトレーサーでチェーンスイッチの理由を公開することで可観測性を向上させ、NodeToClientV\_23に新しいGetDRepDelegations台帳ステートクエリのサポートを追加し、V2 LedgerDBでのリソースの取り違えによって引き起こされる例外エラーを修正しました。その他の更新には、軽微なコードのクリーンアップや、コンセンサスと台帳の相互作用を明確にする新しいドキュメントが含まれます。

Leiosプロトタイプの開発を継続しました。設計をリファクタリングしてEbIdの代わりにEbHashを使用するようにし、コードベースを単相型に簡素化してイテレーションを高速化し、ThreadNetテストをサポートするためにインメモリーLeiosDbを実装しました。

スケーリング

Mithrilチームは新しい簡潔な証明の実装に注力しました。STMライブラリにおける事前集約SNARKプリミティブに取り組み、非再帰的SNARK回路のゴールデンマスターテストを完了し、CPU実装と回路実装のブリッジ作業を行いました。SNARKとの親和性を高めるための証明書チェーンの適応作業も開始しました。

Cardanoブロックおよびトランザクションのための新しい認証に関する作業を継続しました。これには、署名可能なビルダーの実装に加え、アグリゲーターREST APIにおけるアーティファクトおよび証明ルートの実装が含まれます。

Mithrilノードの静的ビルドに取り組み、シュノア署名のhash-to-curve実装におけるバグを修正しました。

Leiosチームは、研究、シミュレーション、ツール開発において着実な進展を続けました。

3月11日の期限を前に推奨事項の足並みを揃えるため、3月上旬を目標とした簡潔な共同サマリーレポートの作成を提案しました。このレポートは、メインネットでの測定値、TypeScriptシミュレーター、数学的モデル、Delta-Qの分析結果、およびこれまでの研究から得られたプロトコルパラメーターに関する知見を集約するためのものです。

TypeScriptシミュレーター内のLeios関連コンポーネントの開発が進んでおり、間もなくデモが公開される予定です。並行して、UPLCをAikenに逆コンパイルし、LLMを使用して可読性の高い変数名を推論することで、オンチェーンDAppをリバースエンジニアリングする支援ツールも開発しました 。

ドキュメントおよび開発トラッカーの統合を進め、移行計画を精査した他、リサーチ、エンジニアリング、Webの各チーム間で連携し、未解決の技術的課題を解決して移行スケジュールを確定させました。

2月10日のセッション以降、安全性プロパティ記述を完了し、対応する証明を開始しました。その他、ソート投票と認証プロセスの形式化、feta-complyメソッドの明確化、EBS簡易モデルを使用したTypeScript MEVシミュレーションの拡張、計測機能を備えたGo言語ベースのLeiosデモノードを使用したAntithesisテストインフラも進めています。

研究 

\*\*Input Output Research（IOR）\*\*チームは、Work Package 26の計画策定と提案書のレビューに注力しています。

5月に開催されるEurocrypt 2026に併設される、ブロックチェーンワークショップのための暗号ツールの計画も進めています。このワークショップは、異なるエコシステムで暗号に関する問題に取り組む研究者を集め、最新のアプローチや結果について議論することを目的としています。提案の提出はCTBのウェブサイトで2月27日まで受け付けています。


Weekly development report as of 2026-02-13

ECOSYSTEM UPDATES

The information in this section is based on publicly available sources and is provided for informational purposes only. It does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation of any project, product, or service mentioned.

This week in ecosystem updates:

Rare Network is offering event and marketing funding through the Amplify Cardano program

CME Group will launch Cardano futures on February 9

World Mobile announced plans for a new phone, AirNode NFTs, and real-world asset (RWA) positioning as part of its 2026 roadmap

CardanoThingsIO launched a series of online workshops to help developers build their first Cardano IoT project

The Cardano Foundation released the results of its 2025 State of the Cardano Ecosystem survey

The Catalyst program provides a Fund15 update – read more here.

CORE TECHNOLOGY

This week, the performance and tracing team worked on re-establishing performance baselines for node v.10.5 and v.10.6 branches, ensuring recent incremental changes are reflected so that future performance shifts can be accurately attributed. 

Additionally, the team advanced tooling and infrastructure, including adding native HTTPS support to cardano-tracer, progressing a PromQL-like query language and metrics timeseries engine for future alerting and dashboards, and switching the reporting pipeline to the Typst typesetting system for faster builds and more accessible outputs. They also backported changes to re-enable cluster benchmarking on 10.5.x and significantly improved the performance workbench’s profiling capabilities and Nix API.

Finally, the team continued tracing and node diversity work by aligning tracing between cardano-node and dmq-node, migrating cardano-submit-api to the new tracing system, improving default tracing configurations, defining a formal schema for node trace messages, and prototyping trace forwarding in native Rust to support non-Haskell node implementations.

SMART CONTRACTS

The Cardano High Assurance team is thrilled to announce the launch of the early access program for the Cardano High Assurance automatic formal verification tool!

Five companies are already participating in this pilot phase, helping the team refine and enhance the tool for the entire Cardano developer ecosystem.

This is your opportunity to join the early access program to directly influence the development of critical security tooling for Cardano. The team is eager to:

Understand your specific development context

Learn about your pain points with smart contract verification

Gather your hands-on feedback as you use the tool.

Your input will directly shape the product roadmap and ensure the development of exactly what the Cardano developer community needs. Subscribe now: afv\_earlyaccess@iohk.io. 

SCALING

This week, the Mithril team released the 2603.1 distribution. This release adds support for the decentralized message queue (DMQ) protocol, preliminary decentralized configuration, a Blockfrost API integration to fetch stake pool operators’ tickers and names, along with various bug fixes and improvements.

The team also implemented pre-aggregation SNARK primitives in the STM library and continued developing the non-recursive SNARK circuit MVP, including golden tests.

In parallel, work progressed on the new certification for Cardano blocks and transactions, with implementation of the signable builder and artifact routes in the aggregator REST API. The team also completed documentation proposals to increase the adoption of Mithril and DMQ nodes on Cardano.

Finally, they fixed several bugs in the DMQ publisher and follower aggregator and continued updating the protocol security page.

RESEARCH

The Input Output Research (IOR) team has submitted final end-of-year 2025 reports to Intersect following a three-week consultation period with the community. The IOR team disseminated these Foundational Research and Technology Validation reports through January, achieving an estimated reach of over 24,000 across all ecosystem platforms. Work Package 25, the first under Cardano Vision, has now been formally closed, and the associated funding milestones have been completed.

Work Package 26 planning is well underway, and the team is assessing options following recent stakeholder interviews on research proposals.



エコシステム

本セクションの情報は、一般に利用可能な情報源に基づいており、情報提供のみを目的として提供されています。言及されているプロジェクト、製品、サービスを推奨するものではありません。

今週のエコシステム更新情報

Rare NetworkがAmplify Cardanoプログラムを通じてイベントおよびマーケティングの資金調達を提供

CME Groupが2月9日にCardano先物を上場

World Mobileが2026年ロードマップを公開。新型スマホやAirNode NFT、RWAへの注力を発表

CardanoThingsIOがCardano IoTプロジェクトを支援するオンラインワークショップを開始

Cardano財団が2025年Cardanoエコシステム現状調査の結果を発表

コアテクノロジー

パフォーマンス＆トレースチームは、 ノードv.10.5およびv.10.6ブランチのパフォーマンスベースラインの再確立に取り組みました。これにより、直近の微細な変更が反映され、将来的なパフォーマンスの変化を正確に特定できるようになります。 

ツールとインフラを強化しました。具体的には、cardano-tracerへのネイティブHTTPSサポートの追加、将来的なアラートやダッシュボード構築のためのPromQL風クエリ言語およびメトリクス時系列エンジンの開発、ビルドの高速化とアウトプットのアクセシビリティ向上のため、Typst組版システムへレポート作成パイプラインを移行するなどの作業を行いました。10.5.x におけるクラスターベンチマークを再有効化するための変更をバックポートし、パフォーマンスワークベンチのプロファイリング機能とNix APIを大幅に改善しました。

トレーシングとノードの多様化に関する作業を継続しました。cardano-nodeとdmq-nodeの間でのトレーシングの整合、cardano-submit-apiの新トレーシングシステムへの移行、デフォルトのトレーシング設定の改善、ノードトレースメッセージの形式スキーマの定義を行い、Haskell以外のノード実装をサポートするため、ネイティブRustによるトレース転送のプロトタイプ作成を行いました。

スマートコントラクト

Cardano High Assuranceチームは、Cardano High Assurance自動形式検証ツールの早期アクセスプログラムの開始を喜びとともに発表します。

すでに5社がこのパイロットフェーズに参加しており、Cardano開発エコシステム全体に向けて、チームによるツールの洗練と強化を支援しています。

これは、早期アクセスプログラムに参加して、Cardanoの重要なセキュリティツールの開発に直接影響を与えるチャンスです。チームは以下に重点を置いています。

ユーザーの具体的な開発コンテキストの把握

スマートコントラクト検証における課題の特定

ツール使用時の直接的なフィードバックの収集

皆様の意見は、プロダクトロードマップを形作り、Cardano開発コミュニティが真に必要とするものを開発するために不可欠です。登録はこちらから：afv\_earlyaccess@iohk.io

スケーリング

Mithrilチームは2603.1ディストリビューションをリリースしました。このリリースでは、分散型メッセージキュー（DMQ）プロトコルのサポート、分散型設定の予備サポート、ステークプールオペレーターのティッカーと名称を取得するためのBlockfrost API統合のほか、さまざまなバグ修正と改善が追加されています。

STMライブラリーに集約前SNARKプリミティブを実装し、ゴールデンテストを含む非再帰型SNARK回路のMVPの開発を継続しました。

Cardanoのブロックおよびトランザクションの新しい認証に関する作業を進め、アグリゲーターREST APIにおける署名可能ビルダーとアーティファクトルートの実装を行いました。CardanoにおけるMithrilおよびDMQノードの普及を促進するためのドキュメント草案の作成を完了しました。

DMQのパブリッシャーおよびフォロワーアグリゲーターのバグを修正し、プロトコルのセキュリティページの更新を継続しました。

研究

\*\*Input Output Research（IOR）\*\*チームは、コミュニティとの3週間にわたる協議期間を経て、2025年末の最終レポートをIntersectに提出しました。チームは1月を通じてこれらの「基礎研究」および「技術検証」レポートを公開し、あらゆるエコシステムプラットフォームを通じて推定24,000人以上にリーチしました。Cardano Visionの下での最初のワークパッケージであるWP25はこれで正式に終了し、関連する資金提供のマイルストーンも完了しました。

現在はWP26の計画が順調に進んでおり、研究案に関する最近のステークホルダーインタビューを踏まえて、チームは選択肢の評価を行っています。


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