The Plutus team hosted UPLC 2025 and introduced the scaleValue primitive for the upcoming hard fork. Scaling advancements include the Mithril 2543.0 distribution and the Hydra v1.1.0 release, while Intersect concluded its committee election voting. Additionally, the Ouroboros Phalanx upgrade was introduced alongside a new Compact DApps category for Project Catalyst Fund15.

The Hydra team announced the launch of v1, marking the protocol as production-ready. The ledger team finalized CIP-118, introducing nested transactions and Babel fees, while IOG published a deep dive on Ouroboros Phalanx to deter grinding attacks. Additionally, the consensus team showcased a Leios prototype, Intersect committee elections are currently underway, and Project Catalyst Fund15 is preparing for its official launch.

The Hydra protocol has reached v1 and is now production-ready. This scaling solution enables high-throughput, low-latency applications by processing transactions off-chain in 'Heads' while retaining layer 1 security. Validated by Midnight’s Glacier Drop, this release delivers a feature-complete protocol, a stable API, and interoperability improvements.

The ecosystem has reached a milestone of 2,014 projects, while applications are being prepared for .ada and .cardano gTLDs. Wanchain has launched a bridge to Sonic, and technical progress continues with Mithril's work on incremental snapshots and configuration decentralization. Furthermore, committee election voting is opening for the community, and Project Catalyst Fund15 is set to launch.

A blog post by Kris Bennett introduces Ouroboros Phalanx, an extension of the Ouroboros Praos consensus protocol. Phalanx strengthens Cardano's security by using verifiable delay functions (VDFs) to make randomness "grinding attacks" economically infeasible. This enhancement not only deters adversaries but also improves network performance, reducing transaction settlement times.

Intersect announced that protocol parameter updates proposed by the Technical Steering Committee have entered the Preview testnet. These changes, which include increasing the block size to 128KB and raising Plutus script memory units per transaction to 20M, are designed to enhance network throughput and support more complex DeFi applications on Cardano.

The development report highlights the Hydra team's release of version 1.0.0. The consensus team advanced the Leios CIP, while the performance team benchmarked node v.10.6 and the LSM-tree backend. The Plutus team finalized the implementation of CIP-0153, introducing the Value built-in type. In the ecosystem, Project Catalyst Fund14 voting concluded, and the Cardano Foundation launched its Summit 2025 PR campaign.

The ecosystem has reached 114.56 million transactions and an increase in active DReps, while the Asia tour concluded in Tokyo. Yoroi v6.0 launched, integrating DexHunter and Minswap. Additionally, Midnight Network partnered with CSWAP for privacy-first DeFi solutions, and the Hydra-node v1.0.0 pre-release is now available.

Progress continues on CIP-112 and features for the next intra-era hard fork. The first fully community-elected constitutional committee is now in place, and the Mithril team has updated the DMQ protocol CIP. Additionally, Yoroi Extension v.5.13.0 has been released, alongside new partnerships for Sundial Protocol and Midnight Network.

The consensus team is auditing the KES agent and refactoring the hard fork combinator for Peras-awareness. The Plutus team is enabling sums-of-products and built-in functions for the upcoming intra-era hard fork. Meanwhile, IOG and zkFold have partnered for a trustless ETH-Cardano bridge, and Minswap's "Wen" token generator is now live.