Cardano News

The Plutus team hosted UPLC 2025 and introduced the scaleValue primitive for the upcoming hard fork. Scaling advancements include the Mithril 2543.0 distribution and the Hydra v1.1.0 release, while Intersect concluded its committee election voting. Additionally, the Ouroboros Phalanx upgrade was introduced alongside a new Compact DApps category for Project Catalyst Fund15.

In a blog post, Intersect's Growth and Marketing Committee shared key findings from their first community-wide marketing survey. The results highlight a strong demand for unified messaging and increased support for developers and founders. Respondents prioritized DeFi and real-world use cases, advocating for treasury-backed liquidity programs. While grassroots efforts are effective, there is a clear call for better storytelling tools and a cohesive long-term vision to guide Cardano's growth.

The Hydra team announced the launch of v1, marking the protocol as production-ready. The ledger team finalized CIP-118, introducing nested transactions and Babel fees, while IOG published a deep dive on Ouroboros Phalanx to deter grinding attacks. Additionally, the consensus team showcased a Leios prototype, Intersect committee elections are currently underway, and Project Catalyst Fund15 is preparing for its official launch.

"Community Holds the Mic" explores the ecosystem's culture with insights from Rare Evo. Content creators Kaizen Crypto, Lars Brünjes, and Cardano Whale are featured for their contributions. Additionally, a developer survey remains open for participation, and voting for committee elections is officially active.

The Hydra protocol has reached v1 and is now production-ready. This scaling solution enables high-throughput, low-latency applications by processing transactions off-chain in 'Heads' while retaining layer 1 security. Validated by Midnight’s Glacier Drop, this release delivers a feature-complete protocol, a stable API, and interoperability improvements.

The ecosystem has reached a milestone of 2,014 projects, while applications are being prepared for .ada and .cardano gTLDs. Wanchain has launched a bridge to Sonic, and technical progress continues with Mithril's work on incremental snapshots and configuration decentralization. Furthermore, committee election voting is opening for the community, and Project Catalyst Fund15 is set to launch.

A blog post by Kris Bennett introduces Ouroboros Phalanx, an extension of the Ouroboros Praos consensus protocol. Phalanx strengthens Cardano's security by using verifiable delay functions (VDFs) to make randomness "grinding attacks" economically infeasible. This enhancement not only deters adversaries but also improves network performance, reducing transaction settlement times.

Intersect announced that protocol parameter updates proposed by the Technical Steering Committee have entered the Preview testnet. These changes, which include increasing the block size to 128KB and raising Plutus script memory units per transaction to 20M, are designed to enhance network throughput and support more complex DeFi applications on Cardano.

The Cardano Foundation's Q3 2025 report details a focus on adoption, resilience, and education. Key activities included the 2025 Asia Tour, the application process for .ada and .cardano gTLDs, and preparations for the Cardano Summit in Berlin. The quarter also saw major governance milestones, including the seating of the first community-elected Constitutional Committee.

The development report highlights the Hydra team's release of version 1.0.0. The consensus team advanced the Leios CIP, while the performance team benchmarked node v.10.6 and the LSM-tree backend. The Plutus team finalized the implementation of CIP-0153, introducing the Value built-in type. In the ecosystem, Project Catalyst Fund14 voting concluded, and the Cardano Foundation launched its Summit 2025 PR campaign.