Cardano News

The Cardano Foundation announced eight ventures for the Cardano Accelerator Program Fall 2026 cohort. Five ventures joined the Core track and three the Spotlight track, focusing on digital product passports, supply chain traceability, verified identity, and responsible AI oracles. Each team receives a CHF 10,000 contribution and prepares for a February 2027 Demo Day.

Intersect released cardano-node 11.1.2, which supersedes 11.1.1 and asks SPOs to prioritize the upgrade alongside mithril-signer 1.1.9. The Dingo Go node validated mainnet blocks, a milestone for node diversity, while the Board Election entered its final week with eleven candidates competing for two seats. The Constitutional Amendment Portal holds seven proposals in consultation, and three governance actions remain live, including the OpenZeppelin Stack treasury withdrawal and the minPoolCost parameter change.

Dijkstra batch validation was implemented so Plutus scripts for sub-transactions now run and their execution budgets count toward block and fee limits, closing a gap where validators and minting policies went unchecked. Withdrawals handling was reworked in the ENTITIES rule, TxInfo translation for protocol version 4 was implemented, and Leios protocol parameters landed in the Dijkstra era. Hydra closed a fanout wedge that could leave a head stuck after a partial withdrawal, stabilized broadcast connections under heavy load, and completed the Performance milestone.

Plutus moves from IO Labs to Midgard Labs, joining Se7en Labs, Teragone, ICAN Group, and BlockPQR as specialist teams maintaining core Cardano functions. Midgard Labs already audits and writes Plutus smart contracts, contributes to the Plutarch and Aiken ecosystems, and its CEO helped bring Plutus tooling into the Plutus Pioneer Program. The transition is coordinated openly through Intersect.

The TOKEN2049 Origins Hackathon called for builders to create AI agent payment solutions on Cardano using x402, with 200 free spots and $27,500 in prizes. The Constitutional Amendment Portal opened seven proposals to community consultation, Intersect Board Elections opened voting for eleven candidates across two seats, and the SDG Blockchain Accelerator opened applications for up to four equity-free funded teams.

Intersect pre-released cardano-node 11.1.1 with Dijkstra preparations advancing across the ecosystem, including a readiness tracker and upcoming DijkstraNet testnet. GovTool found a new maintainer in Sireto, led by original builder Sandip Pandey, ensuring the governance tool stays open source and actively maintained. The Board Election confirmed eleven candidates for two member-elected seats, and the newly enacted Constitutional Committee began its term.

The Leios download logic was rewritten to bound time and memory, a transaction cache was added, unwanted node disconnects were fixed, and mempool ledger reads were capped, while ledger state garbage collection was threaded. Plutus merged casing on Data, advanced the keepPolicies and dropPolicies built-ins for the future Dijkstra era, and released Plu-tan 1.0, the static analyzer for Plutus scripts. Hydra shipped 2.4.1, a security release removing an optimized transaction-validation path that could let a malicious participant get invalid transactions into confirmed snapshots.

Intersect detailed the Dijkstra era node roadmap, placing potential hard fork enactment between December 5 and January 4 with a high-confidence window from February 24 to March 26. The Constitutional Committee update ratified with 71.95% DRep and 56.54% SPO support, and the newly elected committee takes seats without a gap in oversight. The Board Election opened applications for two member-elected seats, and the Constitutional Amendment Portal added threaded discussions, a drafts area, and co-author crediting.

Benchmarks of Cardano node v.11.1.0 showed reduced CPU usage alongside a memory increase that is being addressed in the v.11.1.1 patch release. The Hydra team moved its specification to Typst, formalized it in Agda, and published native Linux ARM64 node images alongside AMD64, with faster Blockfrost query caching. The research team held its second Cardano Vision 26 workshop, covering data availability requirements and specifications.

Intersect opened applications for two elected Board seats, with voting from September 14 to 25 and results expected on September 28. The alpha Constitutional Amendment Portal gives ada holders a more accessible way to propose and discuss amendments to the Constitution. Daedalus 11.3.0 adds a DRep directory, and updated stake pool operator scripts support the upcoming LedgerApp v8 and Cardano-Signer v1.35.