Cardano News

The Cardano Foundation launched its inaugural Annual Report today. From technical infrastructure support to spreading knowledge or establishing targeted partnerships and collaborations, the report showcases the Foundation’s work across its three core focus areas of operational resilience, education, and adoption.

Since February 2023, the Hydra project released version 0.9.0, which brought significant on-chain and off-chain updates, including cost reductions in Plutus scripts, improved mutation testing, and the addition of a new tutorial. The focus now shifts to making Hydra mainnet compatible, with version 0.10.0 being the first mainnet-ready release. The roadmap was updated, prioritizing API configurability and marking less-demanded features as ideas for discussion. The team also optimized on-chain scripts and improved Hydra's UX. A key milestone was opening a Hydra head on the Cardano mainnet during a team workshop in Austria.

In this interview, Jingles, one of the co-founders of Mesh, talks about the project and how it aims to improve the developer experience within the Cardano ecosystem. Mesh is an open-source software developer kit that provides developers with the necessary resources and support to build innovative and impactful applications on the Cardano blockchain. Jingles discusses Mesh's features, the reasons for choosing Cardano, and the project's plans, such as a bounty program and improving the serialization library.

Dynamic P2P networking is an important evolution for Cardano and a further boost to the network's performance, resilience, and decentralization. It comes as a built-in functionality with node v.1.35.6 release today. The SPO community is now encouraged to test P2P functionality by updating one of their relays to use the P2P topology mode.

Since January 2023, the Hydra project has made significant progress. Version 0.9.0 was released, incorporating on-chain and off-chain updates, with a focus now on achieving mainnet compatibility for version 0.10.0. The roadmap was updated to align with 2023 objectives, including new items like creating a use case-centric roadmap and opening the specification with a change process. Key development work included aligning the implementation with the HeadV1 specification, improving Hydra transaction profiling, and addressing off-chain protocol logic. Community efforts included audit guidelines, a new tutorial, and ongoing collaborations like Hydra for Payments and Hydra for Voting. The Hydra project also expanded its presence on Discord to engage more with the community.

A set of frequently asked questions about the recent Valentine upgrade. It introduces built-in functions for ECDSA and Schnorr signatures alongside Cardano's native signature system, facilitating efficient cross-chain applications. This upgrade, requiring a focused hard fork, maintains the ledger era while expanding developer tools for secure and versatile DApp creation. It leverages popular cryptographic standards to enhance Cardano's usability and interoperability with other blockchains, ensuring high security through expert audits.

Since December 2022, the Hydra project has made progress on several fronts. The team focused on aligning the implementation with the HeadV1 protocol specification, addressing gaps in the on-chain scripts, and improving the mutation test framework. The roadmap was slightly updated, with new items like creating a use case-centric roadmap. Community efforts include the Hydra for Voting project and a lite paper on Hydra for auctions. The team also outlined key themes for 2023, including achieving mainnet maturity, increasing adoption, and promoting sustainable open-source development. The goal is to position Hydra as a maintainable, community-driven project.

The Cardano Foundation focuses on transparency, governance, and accountability in blockchain, emphasizing the importance of widespread access to information for full realization. It drives the adoption of the Cardano blockchain as a foundational layer for future financial and social systems through three core areas: operational resilience, education, and adoption.

The Cardano Foundation has announced today the appointment of Andreas Pletscher as its Chief Operating Officer (COO) and Nicolas Jacquemart as its Chief Legal Officer (CLO). Pletscher joins the Foundation from PwC while Jacquemart joins from FINMA, the Swiss financial market supervisory authority.

We interviewed the NEWM team, a blockchain-based project aiming to create a music ecosystem that allows musicians to own their creative content and monetize their art from conception to retirement. Including a streaming platform, music rights marketplace, micropayments, ticketing, and fractionalization of IP rights, focusing on user-friendly design and technology using the Cardano blockchain.