Cardano News

The Constitutional Amendment Portal is live for alpha testing at cap.intersectmbo.org, giving the community a structured home for proposing and refining changes to the Cardano Constitution. Users can highlight a precise passage of the Constitution, submit a Constitutional Amendment Proposal or raise an issue, and follow each proposal through its lifecycle. Wallet connection uses a stake address as identity, with no account, email, or password required.

The performance and tracing team completed Van Rossem hard fork benchmarks, while the ledger team advanced Dijkstra nested transactions and implemented CIP-50 pledge-leverage-based staking rewards. Hydra released 2.3.0 with a significant snapshot-processing speedup, YAML node configuration, and native HD wallet key support. The developer experience team completed its Community Alignment deliverable with a live ecosystem map, and IO research opened the Cardano Vision '26 Mid-Year report for community feedback.

Cardano and Injective are connected via the IBC protocol on testnet, Cardano's first live on-chain IBC rail, enabling native transfers without centralized bridges. The Constitutional Committee election concluded with audited results, confirming Philip DiSarro, Leandros BSP, Marek Mahut, and Cardano Curia as elected candidates. The Musashi Dojo public Leios testnet moved to parameter and load testing ahead of its water phase. The Cardano Foundation announced its Reef Data eG partnership, joined the Energy Tokenization Sandbox, and launched a Governance Applied Academy course, while CIP-0186 on mobile wallet UX completed.

The Intersect Parameter Committee submitted a parameter update governance action combining a minPoolCost reduction from 170 to 75 ada with the second part of a 25% increase to Plutus memory limits. Ratification requires support from both DReps and stake pool operators. The lower fixed fee gives small pools breathing room as block rewards decline, while the completed memory increase eases contract deployment for developers.

The consensus team released prototype-2026w29, enabling endorser block certification inside the forging loop to raise throughput, and extended the LeiosNotify mini-protocol toward the full block-announcement flow. Lace 2.2 introduced Bitcoin support for Ledger and Trezor hardware wallets, added SeedSigner air-gapped signing, and published the results of an independent security audit. Plutus implemented the multiIndexArray and policies built-ins from CIP-0156 and CIP-0168, gated behind the Dijkstra era, while Mithril completed IVC SNARK benchmarks and prepared the 2630 distribution.

The Cardano Foundation partnered with Reef Data eG, a Hamburg-based data cooperative, to record payment flows transparently and auditably on the Cardano blockchain using Reeve, the Foundation's open-source reporting transparency platform. Reef Data developed the application layer, including a user wallet extension and public and auditor dashboards, while the Foundation provided and extended the Reeve Publisher and Data Reader services. The pilot demonstrates how sales, reward distributions, and member payouts can be verified on-chain by cooperative members and independent auditors.

The ledger team continued Leios integration and implemented CIP-181, removing the DRep-delegation requirement for reward withdrawals. The Lace wallet update introduced in-app swaps, CardanoCube integration, and Ledger and Trezor hardware wallet support. The Mithril team completed its non-recursive SNARK proof refactoring and upgraded the midnight-zk library. An Intersect treasury withdrawal of ₳25.4M was ratified to fund technical stewardship and governance coordination.

The Van Rossem hard fork activated at Protocol Version 11, marking Cardano's first hard fork proposed, debated, and ratified entirely through on-chain governance. The 2026 Constitutional Committee election entered its final voting days, with candidates discussing the role's realities in the latest Roundtable Talk. New CIPs, including stake pool pruning and handle provider registry updates, entered the review cycle. The Cardano Foundation joined the x402 Foundation and released new Aiken cryptography developer guides, while community spotlights covered Learn Cardano's AI-agent payments update and Linda's ecosystem analysis.

The consensus team stabilized the Leios testnet with two prototype builds and a voting dashboard for endorser block observability. The High Assurance team shipped the Plinth Static Analyzer on the Visual Studio Marketplace and a JSON-RPC backend for property-based testing. Mithril completed the SNARK recursive circuit modularity work and upgraded the midnight-zk library. Under Voltaire, the van Rossem hard fork passed ratification and will enact at the next epoch boundary, advancing Plutus ahead of the Dijkstra era that introduces Ouroboros Leios. The research team published the Cardano Vision 2026 Mid-Year Progress and Transparency Report draft for community feedback.

Cardano's Plutus Core ships first-class built-in primitives for the pairing-friendly BLS12-381 elliptic curve, exposing scalar multiplication, point addition, hash-to-curve, and pairing checks that any Plutus or Aiken script can run natively without external services or trusted oracles. The article walks through the curve and the Aiken API, then builds four concrete protocols on top of those primitives: BLS signature aggregation and multi-sig, key derivation from passwords and seeds, verifiable random functions for privacy and leader selection, and BBS+ signatures for anonymous credentials with selective disclosure. A follow-up will compose the same primitives into zk-SNARKs and polynomial commitment schemes.