Cardano News

The Cardano Foundation co-organized a Rooftop UTXO Pitch Night with Draper Dragon, putting up to $500,000 in front of 90+ investors and nine teams. On mainnet, CIP-0113 lets issuers embed identity, sanctions, and freeze rules inside the asset itself, enforced by the ledger on every transfer. A draft constitutional amendment covering the new hard fork parameters also sits open for review ahead of the Dijkstra vote.

Frederik Gregaard, the Foundation's chief executive, used a fireside chat called Beyond the Token to argue that tokenized assets should start from full transparency on a public chain and add privacy layers on top. More than 30 projects presented at the booth, and over 700 people registered for Node Diversity Day.

The revised amendment defines the minimum pool margin and moves to deprecate the old minimum pool cost guardrail, which would otherwise have blocked that change. Node 11.2 is due to carry the full Dijkstra feature set without Leios and launch the public DijkstraNet, while 11.3 will seek to merge them with linear Leios into a hard fork release candidate. 30% of mainnet block production runs on versions older than 11.1.2.

Consensus moved the Leios database to main and released ouroboros-consensus 5.0 and 5.1.0.0, while the mempool reserves capacity for an Endorser Block that comes from Dijkstra-era protocol parameters and is zero in every earlier era. Hydra fixed a fanout step that crashed nodes holding tokens minted on layer 2, and research presented a paper on reserve depletion in proof-of-stake systems at AFT 2026.

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.