Explore the stories below for curated news, stories, and inspiration from within the Cardano ecosystem.
The September 12, 2025, development report highlights the ledger team's progress on CIP-112 and features for the next intra-era hard fork. A major Voltaire milestone was reached with the first fully community-elected constitutional committee now in place. In scaling, the Mithril team updated the DMQ protocol CIP. Ecosystem news includes the release of Yoroi Extension v.5.13.0 and new partnerships for Sundial Protocol and Midnight Network.
Intersect’s September 7, 2025, blog post recaps the first fully community-led Constitutional Committee election. Seven members were elected via on-chain vote by DReps and SPOs to uphold the Cardano Constitution for the next term. The post details the voting process, which used a one-lovelace-one-vote system, and introduces the newly selected members. This election marks a critical milestone in establishing a robust, decentralized governance framework for the ecosystem.
The September 05, 2025, development report highlights the consensus team's work on the first public draft of the Leios CIP, LSM-tree support, and KES agent integration. The Plutus team improved the evaluator and deserializer and added support for built-in units and pairs. In ecosystem news, MLabs launched feeswap.io, the Cardano Foundation rebuilt the Developer Portal, and World Mobile Chain's $WMTX token began trading on KrakenFX.
The September 01, 2025, Cardano Community Digest features a video recap of Rare Evo in Las Vegas. It also spotlights a Cexplorer.io article on the benefits of Cardano's liquid staking model. Further highlights include an explanation of Leios as a major scalability milestone and a demonstration of an on-chain version of Flappy Bird built using Hydra by Tony Thanh.
A blog post by Nicolas Biri on August 25, 2025, details Input | Output's research and development process for turning foundational research into practical advancements. It highlights recent progress on Ouroboros Peras for fast finality, Ouroboros Leios for high throughput, and the Cardinal protocol for a trust-minimized bridge between Bitcoin and Cardano. The post emphasizes a structured, evidence-based methodology to ensure robust, scalable, and relevant innovations.
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.