Cardano News

The .ada application joins .sol, .ethereum, .btc, and .bitcoin among Web3 bids in ICANN's first new gTLD round since 2012, after a Cardano governance action passed with roughly 75% support. If approved, .ada could support simplified wallet addresses, integration with decentralized identity such as Veridian, and domain tokenization.

Applications and AI agents keep wallets on the machine they run on and sign through one interface across Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin, and now Cardano. Each agent can get its own access key with policies OWS evaluates before signing, and the integration extends the signer to derive payment and stake keys separately under CIP-1852.

Programmable tokens stay native Cardano assets built on the EUTXO model, so wallets, explorers, and applications handle them like any other token while compliance logic travels with the asset and execution costs stay predictable. The standard launches with support from Eternl, GeroWallet, CardanoScan, and BloxBean, and CMTA recognizes CIP-113 as a smart contract equivalent to the CMTAT for its certification scheme.

Cardano node 11.1.3 corrects an IPv4 decoding issue introduced in 11.1.2, and 11.2 is expected to carry the new block format and Plutus V4 context without Leios once its pre-release lands. CAP-12 adds every new Dijkstra protocol parameter to the Constitution in three steps, with guardrails and an SPO vote for security-critical settings, and the technical steering committee is recruiting two funded CIP editors.

The Leios committee is selected at the epoch boundary, Plutus scripts can now see the sub-transaction index, and Dijkstra gains protocol parameters for reference-input costs. Node 11.1.1 benchmarks keep the CPU gains of 11.1.0, the Leios transaction benchmark runs standalone for SPOs without nix or a Haskell toolchain, and Hydra reports BacklogFull only when its backlog would take too long to clear.

Transfer rules such as allowlists, freezes, and jurisdiction limits can now live inside the asset itself, after CIP-113 was merged into Cardano's main CIP repository. Cardano marked nine years since its genesis block with 2,890 stake pools, 123.98 million transactions, and 158 governance actions, while Intersect shipped node 11.1.3 to fix IPv4 address decoding. The Foundation also detailed a UCLA Anderson partnership.

Cardano provides the traceable record behind the SAF Book-and-Claim model, showing where an environmental benefit originated, who it was assigned to, and that it has been claimed only once, with travelers able to calculate their route's CS-SAF amount and receive a certificate. The Diesel R application converts information from each production, transport, and use stage into a continuous record that can support Scope 3 emissions reporting.

Cardano Academy material and use cases enter UCLA's blockchain coursework, including Blockchain Cryptocurrency Applications in Business and Finance, from 2027. The agreement also sponsors five fellowships for early-stage companies in the UCLA Accelerate program and covers the Foundation's sponsorship of the 2027 Draper Innovation Showcase, extending education work already running with the University of Zurich, the University of Brasília, and PUC-Rio.

Cardano Node 11.2 should carry the new block format and Plutus V4 context but not Leios, and it is not a hard fork-ready release, so tooling teams are asked to assess breaking APIs early. The Parameter Committee is reviewing roughly 100 new Dijkstra guardrails plus about 50 for Peras, wallet vendors are being briefed on BLS key changes, and the Civics Committee rebuilt its knowledge base around six completed objectives.

Certified Endorser Blocks move from the rollback file to the settled one in the background, so each database file can live on its own disk, and garbage collection marks rows before deleting them in batches instead of blocking the node. Lace 2.3 shipped reworked staking and DRep browsers with broader hardware wallet support, Hydra fixed a Mesh SDK deposit lockout and replaced 13 slow end-to-end tests with 30 unit tests, and Plutus closed out its September milestones.