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 Cardano Foundation's Q3 2025 report details a focus on adoption, resilience, and education. Key activities included the 2025 Asia Tour, the application process for .ada and .cardano gTLDs, and preparations for the Cardano Summit in Berlin. The quarter also saw major governance milestones, including the seating of the first community-elected Constitutional Committee.

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.

Intersect board election results have been announced, with Adam Rusch and Jack Briggs elected as new members. This milestone marks the first time a majority of the board is directly elected by its members, achieved with a 26% voter turnout to reinforce decentralized, community-led governance.

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.

Cardano Foundation CEO Frederik Gregaard unveiled an updated roadmap focused on accelerating global adoption. Key initiatives include injecting eight figures in ada liquidity into DeFi, expanding the Web3 adoption team, and committing up to 2 million ada to the Cardano Venture Hub in 2026. The plan also prioritizes Real-World Asset tokenization, increases the 2026 marketing budget by 12%, and boosts governance decentralization by delegating an additional 220M ada to select DReps.