Cardano News

The development report highlights continued ecosystem growth, with 2,005 active projects now building on Cardano. The ledger team defined PlutusV4 for the Dijkstra era, fixed a serialization bug, and implemented hard fork triggers. Scaling work saw the Mithril team complete the implementation of the publisher and consumer for the DMQ network, while the Hydra team worked on their 2025-2026 roadmap and Glacier-drop support. Ecosystem news includes MuesliSwap’s launch of MidStarterApp and Flow DeFi confirming USDA stablecoin support.

Project Acropolis is an initiative to make the network more developer-friendly. It aims to transform the Cardano node into a modular framework, allowing developers to build directly on the node using familiar tools. This approach seeks to lower the entry barrier, fostering innovation and ecosystem growth while preserving high-security standards.

Project Acropolis is an initiative to enhance developer accessibility. While the robust security of Cardano is acknowledged, the steep learning curve has hindered ecosystem growth. Acropolis aims to transition the Cardano node from a monolithic to a modular architecture, enabling developers to build applications using familiar tools directly within the node. This evolution is intended to lower entry barriers and foster innovation without compromising high-security standards.

The quarterly development report from the Cardano Foundation highlights significant progress across its tooling ecosystem. Key achievements include numerous improvements to the Cardano Rosetta Java implementation for enhanced performance and security. The report also details the release of Yaci Store v2.0.0, which introduces full ledger-state calculation independent of DB Sync, along with a powerful new plugin framework for greater extensibility.

In this session of the Cardano Developer Office Hours, Giovanni Gargiulo, Senior Software Engineer – DevOps at the Cardano Foundation, presents the new Token Registry API v2 with full CIP-68 support. He demonstrates API endpoints, explains best practices for using the query_priority parameter, and covers support for tokens under both CIP-26 and CIP-68. A live demo shows practical use cases and integration opportunities for developers.

The development report highlights continued ecosystem growth, with the number of projects building on Cardano reaching 2,004. The consensus team enhanced the Leios simulator and improved resource management in UTXO-HD. The Lace team released v.1.24 with multichain and user-centric upgrades. Mithril focused on the DMQ network, while Hydra released v.0.22.0. The community also voted in favor of the Intersect budget info action, paving the way for treasury withdrawals.

A Roundtable Talk on June 25, 2025, provided a platform for candidates in the Constitutional Committee election. The session allowed individuals and groups to introduce their background, vision, and motivation for the role. Each candidate answered the same set of questions in a timed format, ensuring a fair and structured showcase for DReps and the community to make informed voting decisions before the June 30 deadline.

The Cardano Community Digest recaps the Cardano Berlin Hackathon and the Eureka Crypto Conference, both community-driven events from Berlin Blockchain Week. It highlights Midnight's new Tokenomics & Incentives paper and the release of animated governance flowcharts on cardano.org. Additionally, the digest features the latest from Essential Cardano's Dev Report and an introduction to the Cardano Blueprint, a resource designed to simplify understanding of the protocol.

A June 23, 2025, blog post by Fergie Miller summarizes a Cardano R&D session on Layer-2 expansion beyond Hydra. The session featured presentations on Midgard (an optimistic rollup), a zk-rollup from zkFold SA, a ZK bridge from Eryx Cooperativa, and Gummiworm (a scalable rollup from Sundae Labs). Key discussion themes included interoperability, capital fragmentation, and the importance of security.

A June 23, 2025, IOHK blog post by a team of researchers explores the concept of slashing as a security mechanism in blockchains. It contrasts Ethereum's slashing-based model, where validators risk losing staked assets for misbehavior, with Cardano's non-slashing approach. The authors argue that slashing is ineffective against majority attacks and can deter participation, while Cardano’s method, relying on formal verification and stake-weighted incentives, provides robust security without these drawbacks.