Cardano News

The TOKEN2049 Origins Hackathon called for builders to create AI agent payment solutions on Cardano using x402, with 200 free spots and $27,500 in prizes. The Constitutional Amendment Portal opened seven proposals to community consultation, Intersect Board Elections opened voting for eleven candidates across two seats, and the SDG Blockchain Accelerator opened applications for up to four equity-free funded teams.

Intersect pre-released cardano-node 11.1.1 with Dijkstra preparations advancing across the ecosystem, including a readiness tracker and upcoming DijkstraNet testnet. GovTool found a new maintainer in Sireto, led by original builder Sandip Pandey, ensuring the governance tool stays open source and actively maintained. The Board Election confirmed eleven candidates for two member-elected seats, and the newly enacted Constitutional Committee began its term.

The Leios download logic was rewritten to bound time and memory, a transaction cache was added, unwanted node disconnects were fixed, and mempool ledger reads were capped, while ledger state garbage collection was threaded. Plutus merged casing on Data, advanced the keepPolicies and dropPolicies built-ins for the future Dijkstra era, and released Plu-tan 1.0, the static analyzer for Plutus scripts. Hydra shipped 2.4.1, a security release removing an optimized transaction-validation path that could let a malicious participant get invalid transactions into confirmed snapshots.

Intersect detailed the Dijkstra era node roadmap, placing potential hard fork enactment between December 5 and January 4 with a high-confidence window from February 24 to March 26. The Constitutional Committee update ratified with 71.95% DRep and 56.54% SPO support, and the newly elected committee takes seats without a gap in oversight. The Board Election opened applications for two member-elected seats, and the Constitutional Amendment Portal added threaded discussions, a drafts area, and co-author crediting.

Benchmarks of Cardano node v.11.1.0 showed reduced CPU usage alongside a memory increase that is being addressed in the v.11.1.1 patch release. The Hydra team moved its specification to Typst, formalized it in Agda, and published native Linux ARM64 node images alongside AMD64, with faster Blockfrost query caching. The research team held its second Cardano Vision 26 workshop, covering data availability requirements and specifications.

Intersect opened applications for two elected Board seats, with voting from September 14 to 25 and results expected on September 28. The alpha Constitutional Amendment Portal gives ada holders a more accessible way to propose and discuss amendments to the Constitution. Daedalus 11.3.0 adds a DRep directory, and updated stake pool operator scripts support the upcoming LedgerApp v8 and Cardano-Signer v1.35.

Cardano is now the public proof layer in Blockforce's traceability platform, which has anchored more than 500,000 supply chain records for Brazil's largest fashion groups. Records stay on a permissioned network and only their cryptographic proof reaches Cardano, so auditors can confirm a record is genuine without seeing the underlying data. Engineering work cut the cost per record by 92 percent, and contracts cover 6.5 million records through 2030.

Lace added support for the Keystone hardware wallet in both the browser extension and the mobile app, bringing the wallet to four supported devices. The Plutus team published release 1.68.0.0 with Plutus V4 ledger API types, cardano-init reached its first tagged releases, and Hydra moved persisted event payloads to CBOR, shrinking a three-node benchmark database by more than half. Plinth also gained a one-command install script.

Java developers can build on Cardano with the tools they already use, according to a Cardano Foundation walkthrough of the open-source BloxBean stack. Adding a dependency, writing a test and calling a REST endpoint cover most of what is needed, while the extended UTXO model and validator scripts can be learned gradually alongside. The post also previews three experimental Java projects now in development.

MusashiNet ran for 41 days with 63 pools producing over 127,000 blocks and 30,000 endorser blocks. Leios peaked at 26.8 TxkB/s, six times Cardano's current mainnet ceiling, and carried 54% of chain traffic in stable operation, moving 18x the transaction count of real mainnet traffic. A red team attacked the network without threatening the Praos layer, and the Water phase with a rewards program is live now.