Cardano News

Intersect has deployed the first on-chain vendor smart contract, funding a proposal from TxPipe. This marks a significant milestone for Cardano's treasury management, moving from a theoretical framework to practical implementation. The contract holds the approved ada budget in escrow and automates milestone-based payments. This new system ensures transparent, secure, and accountable management of community-approved funds, representing a major step forward for decentralized governance.

On August 25, 2025, a blog post by Kris Bennett introduced the Halo2-Plutus verifier, an open-source tool for bringing zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) to Cardano. Spearheaded by Input | Output Research, this project enables on-chain verification of Halo2 proofs within Plinth smart contracts. This innovation is crucial for enhancing privacy and scalability, with its primary application being the Midnight-Cardano zk-bridge, while also supporting broader use cases like confidential transactions.

The August 29, 2025, development report highlights the ledger team's work on enforcing stake pool VRF key uniqueness and integrating Plutus V4 into the Dijkstra era. Smart contract development progressed with Plutus Core adding support for built-in lists. Ecosystem news includes Midnight's partnership with Copper, the launch of the Cardano Governance Education Working Group, and the release of the Halo2-Plutus verifier for zero-knowledge proofs.

The August 22, 2025, development report highlights the Lace wallet v.1.26 release, which includes performance improvements and bug fixes. The consensus team focused on LSM-tree backend integration and continued Leios prototyping. The Mithril team completed the mock DMQ node implementation, and ecosystem growth reached 2,008 projects. Midnight announced a partnership with Block-rewards, and Liqwid Labs launched a new UI.

The August 29, 2025, development report highlights the ledger team's work on enforcing the uniqueness of stake pool VRF keys and integrating Plutus V4 into the Dijkstra era. Smart contract development progressed with Plutus Core adding support for built-in lists. Ecosystem news includes Midnight's partnership with Copper, the launch of the Cardano Governance Education Working Group, and the release of the Halo2-Plutus verifier for zero-knowledge proofs.

The August 15, 2025, development report highlights the ledger team beginning work on CIP-112, known as 'Required Guards,' and refactoring the stake pool state. The performance team released benchmarks for Cardano node v.10.5. On the scaling front, the Leios team advanced its CIP documentation and demonstrated Linear Leios performance under various Plutus workloads, resolving key simulation discrepancies.

The August 08, 2025, development report highlights the full mainnet release of Cardano node v.10.5.1. The consensus team advanced on multiple fronts, including LSM-tree integration and drafting mini-protocols for Linear Leios. The Plutus team is expanding case analysis support and preparing all built-in functions for the next hard fork. Ecosystem news includes partnerships for Midnight Network with Blockchain.com and Wanchain's bridge to the SUI Network.

A blog post from August 7 clarifies the process for treasury withdrawal actions. A proposal must first be ratified by achieving a 67% DRep supermajority and CC approval at an epoch boundary. It is enacted at the following epoch, at which point funds are transferred. Intersect then signs a legal contract with the vendor and deploys a smart contract to transparently manage milestone payments.

A blog post by Ivan Irakoze on August 3, 2025, details Cardano's three-year journey towards decentralized governance. It chronicles the key milestones, from community workshops to the establishment of the Cardano Constitution and elected representatives. This process culminated in a fully autonomous, on-chain democratic system, empowering ada holders to shape the future of the protocol through direct participation and voting.

The August 04, 2025, Cardano Community Digest highlights the historic community approval of core development funding and an SPO Table Talk discussing CIP-50. It also features a developer spotlight on the Masumi Network. Additionally, the digest announces that Project Catalyst Fund 14 is now open for proposals and includes a link to the Cardano Foundation's Q2 2025 report, summarizing recent activities and financial insights.