The ledger team continued Leios integration and implemented CIP-181, removing the DRep-delegation requirement for reward withdrawals. The Lace wallet update introduced in-app swaps, CardanoCube integration, and Ledger and Trezor hardware wallet support. The Mithril team completed its non-recursive SNARK proof refactoring and upgraded the midnight-zk library. An Intersect treasury withdrawal of ₳25.4M was ratified to fund technical stewardship and governance coordination.

The consensus team stabilized the Leios testnet with two prototype builds and a voting dashboard for endorser block observability. The High Assurance team shipped the Plinth Static Analyzer on the Visual Studio Marketplace and a JSON-RPC backend for property-based testing. Mithril completed the SNARK recursive circuit modularity work and upgraded the midnight-zk library. Under Voltaire, the van Rossem hard fork passed ratification and will enact at the next epoch boundary, advancing Plutus ahead of the Dijkstra era that introduces Ouroboros Leios. The research team published the Cardano Vision 2026 Mid-Year Progress and Transparency Report draft for community feedback.

Cardano's Plutus Core ships first-class built-in primitives for the pairing-friendly BLS12-381 elliptic curve, exposing scalar multiplication, point addition, hash-to-curve, and pairing checks that any Plutus or Aiken script can run natively without external services or trusted oracles. The article walks through the curve and the Aiken API, then builds four concrete protocols on top of those primitives: BLS signature aggregation and multi-sig, key derivation from passwords and seeds, verifiable random functions for privacy and leader selection, and BBS+ signatures for anonymous credentials with selective disclosure. A follow-up will compose the same primitives into zk-SNARKs and polynomial commitment schemes.

Input Output's Cyclic Atomic N-party Swap (CANS) protocol arranges participants in a ring where each sends assets once and receives once, with the entire swap enforced as atomic: either everyone gets what they agreed to, or nobody loses anything. The design removes the need for bridges, wrapped tokens, or trusted intermediaries by making signatures conditionally valid behind a shared secret revealed only once every party has locked funds. A reference implementation in Rust, formally verified with up to 20 concurrent parties, shows the approach works in practice today, and any chain with native or verifiable Schnorr signatures can join a swap session.

The performance and tracing team removed the legacy iohk-monitoring tracing backend (roughly 11,000 lines) and RTView from cardano-tracer, while the ledger team extended StAnnTx memoization to Alonzo and merged the first Leios-related changes. In wallets, Lace released browser extension 2.1, headlined by a wallet security check feature. Under Voltaire, DRep voting is underway in the Constitutional Committee election ahead of the July 23 deadline, and the Research team advanced its Cardano Vision 2026 workstreams with the first zero-knowledge technical workshop.

Developed in collaboration between the Cardano Foundation and BloxBean, the new Yaci Store 3.0.0-beta3 Analytics Module is now live. This open-source tool allows developers and researchers to export the entire Cardano blockchain into lightweight Parquet files for complex data queries directly on a local laptop. By streamlining access to transactions, UTXOs, and governance metrics, it eliminates the need for expensive, resource-heavy node infrastructure.

The Consensus team improved Mithril integration for snapshot exports, while Lace Carbon began internal testing. For scaling, Hydra v2.2.0 launched with upgraded benchmarks, and Mithril finalized recursive SNARK verification. Under Voltaire, the Constitutional Committee election became competitive with five candidates for four seats, with DRep voting starting June 23. The Research team advanced its Cardano Vision 2026 workstreams.

The Pyth Network has launched on Cardano, offering all ecosystem projects one year of free, unlimited access to a Pyth Pro API key. Facilitated by the "Pentad" under the critical integrations budget, this integration provides builders with institutional-grade, real-time market data. Structurally, it utilizes a pull oracle model where off-chain data is requested on-demand and verified cryptographically on-chain, keeping transaction fees minimal for decentralized applications.

The van Rossem hard fork upgrade for the Cardano Mainnet has officially commenced. The process coordinates two distinct governance actions: a Plutus Cost Model parameter update (enacted on June 18) and the hard fork initiation action (submitted on June 16). Following successful testing on the Preview and Preprod testnets, the final decision to ratify and execute the upgrade now rests entirely with the on-chain governance bodies (DReps, SPOs, and the Constitutional Committee).

The High Assurance team launched a smart contract testing beta tool, while the Mithril team completed its SNARK-friendly genesis certificate and optimized recursive scaling primitives. Under Voltaire, a critical call for candidates was issued for the upcoming Constitutional Committee election to ensure a competitive process. Finally, the Research team had its Cardano Vision 2026 proposal officially ratified by the community with 74.96% DRep approval.