Cardano News

Intersect is facilitating the election process for Cardano’s Constitutional Committee to fulfill a critical "unowned function" required by Section 3.2 of the Cardano Constitution. Because a fair election requires a structurally neutral administrator, Intersect has stepped in as a non-partisan steward rather than a participant, leveraging its established institutional knowledge in managing member-driven governance. This independent, non-commercial coordination ensures that the committee can be updated efficiently without stalling Cardano's overall governance framework.

The ledger team completed Plutus performance optimizations, while the Smart Contracts team secured funding to extend the "Blaster" verification tool into Aiken. For Leios, treasury funding was approved with 88% support, and a CIP-0164 update reduced certificate size by 40x. Additionally, candidate registration opened for the Constitutional Committee elections.

The Gimbalabs Piece of Pie Hackathon 2026 is underway, utilizing a "build in public" format with qualification based on weekly public updates. Three new CIP updates entered the pipeline, introducing mobile wallet deep-link signing and transaction prioritization, while Aiken v1.1.22 launched with compiler optimizations. Lastly, DReps are voting on a revised Cardano Summit 2026 proposal featuring a 22% budget cut, and the Foundation highlighted stablecoin insights from Mastercard.

The consensus team added initial voting capabilities to the Leios prototype and retired the legacy V1 LedgerDB to simplify the API and clear the way for on-disk tables. In wallets, Lace launched on iOS, wrapping up its multi-platform rollout. Additionally, the Mithril team finalized recursive circuit refactoring and off-circuit verification tests for its SNARK prototype.

The Cardano Accelerator Program (CAP) is seeking specialized service providers for its Fall 2026 cohort, themed around Real-World Trust. Registered legal entities with a proven track record in areas such as go-to-market strategy, compliance, and fundraising can apply to deliver expert-led workshops for the participating startups. The application deadline is June 5, 2026.

The CCI V1 closure report accounts for the ₳70M treasury budget managed by Intersect to onboard tier-one Cardano infrastructure. It successfully deployed native Circle USDC, LayerZero, Pyth Network, and Dune Analytics. Institutional custody via Fireblocks missed the V1 window due to unmet commercial terms and will instead be requested alongside Year 2 maintenance in the upcoming CCI V2 proposal.

IOG has introduced Blaster, an automated formal verification engine for Lean 4 designed to provide mathematical security guarantees for Cardano smart contracts. Tested on complex protocols like Djed and USDCx, Blaster automatically checks for common vulnerabilities (such as double satisfaction) using a Common Vulnerability Library. Developed alongside six ecosystem partners, this tool aims to lower the barrier to high-assurance development, fostering institutional trust and TVL growth for Cardano's Vision 2030.

IO's core teams released Cardano Node v11.0.1 to support the upcoming protocol version 11 intra-era hard fork, while the ledger team advanced preparations for the Dijkstra era. The Plutus team enhanced the UPLC command-line tool, introducing script optimizations that yield over 10% in execution cost savings. In scaling, Hydra v2.1.0 was launched with 7% lower snapshot latency and protocol v12+ compatibility, and Mithril finalized key SNARK circuit validations and standard Schnorr signatures.

IOG has submitted a treasury proposal for ₳27.7M to mature Ouroboros Leios from a testnet prototype into a mainnet-ready release candidate by late 2026. By introducing endorser blocks and committee-based validation, Leios will safely scale Cardano’s throughput capacity by 10x to 65x through a phased rollout. This development directly supports the ecosystem's Vision 2030 goals, featuring milestone-gated funding and independent oversight.

The Cardano Accelerator Program (CAP) is accepting applications for its Fall 2026 cohort, themed Real-World Trust. Run by the Cardano Foundation, the program accelerates early-stage startups building data verification infrastructure like identity, traceability, and digital passports. Participants receive technical and business mentoring leading up to an investor Demo Day. Eligible startups must be registered entities with a live transactional product.