Cardano News

"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.

The Community Digest highlights the ongoing Asia Tour, with stops in Ho Chi Minh City and Tokyo, and the Node Diversity Workshop #2 in Toulouse. It also announces the release of Hydra node v1.0.0 and calls for participation in the State of the Cardano Developer Ecosystem survey, alongside other ecosystem updates and a reminder for the Intersect committee elections.

The ecosystem has reached 114.56 million transactions and an increase in active DReps, while the Asia tour concluded in Tokyo. Yoroi v6.0 launched, integrating DexHunter and Minswap. Additionally, Midnight Network partnered with CSWAP for privacy-first DeFi solutions, and the Hydra-node v1.0.0 pre-release is now available.

Progress continues on CIP-112 and features for the next intra-era hard fork. The first fully community-elected constitutional committee is now in place, and the Mithril team has updated the DMQ protocol CIP. Additionally, Yoroi Extension v.5.13.0 has been released, alongside new partnerships for Sundial Protocol and Midnight Network.