Cardano News

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.

Intersect board election results have been announced, with Adam Rusch and Jack Briggs elected as new members. This milestone marks the first time a majority of the board is directly elected by its members, achieved with a 26% voter turnout to reinforce decentralized, community-led governance.

The ecosystem is celebrating its 8th anniversary, reflecting on its journey from Byron to Voltaire. Voting for the 2025 Summit Awards is officially open, and a developer spotlight features Iagon. Additionally, recent Roundtable Talks were recapped, and Project Catalyst Fund14 voting has launched.

The consensus team is auditing the KES agent and refactoring the hard fork combinator for Peras-awareness. The Plutus team is enabling sums-of-products and built-in functions for the upcoming intra-era hard fork. Meanwhile, IOG and zkFold have partnered for a trustless ETH-Cardano bridge, and Minswap's "Wen" token generator is now live.

Cardano Foundation CEO Frederik Gregaard unveiled an updated roadmap focused on accelerating global adoption. Key initiatives include injecting eight figures in ada liquidity into DeFi, expanding the Web3 adoption team, and committing up to 2 million ada to the Cardano Venture Hub in 2026. The plan also prioritizes Real-World Asset tokenization, increases the 2026 marketing budget by 12%, and boosts governance decentralization by delegating an additional 220M ada to select DReps.

The consensus team drafting an architectural design for Leios (CIP-0164). The Plutus team progressed on implementing the Value built-in type (CIP-0153) and merged multi-scalar multiplication primitives for the next hard fork. In scaling, the Mithril team created a new pre-release, supported Cardano node v.10.5.1, and completed a SNARK proving circuit prototype. IOG also kicked off its 2025 Asia tour.

In a "Let's Talk Cardano" episode summary the Cardano Foundation's Veridian digital identity platform was explored. Authored by Laura Mattiucci, the post details how Veridian, built on Cardano and the KERI protocol, tackles digital trust issues. It features quantum-resistant key management and decouples identity from public keys for interoperability, using the blockchain as a root of trust for its global security monitoring service.

SIDAN Labs shared reflections on the Cardano-Bitcoin DeFi event, while Masumi side events and hackathon registrations for the upcoming Cardano Summit were announced. Intersect introduced the Cardano Vision 2030 initiative, and a new centralized Community Events Calendar has launched to improve coordination.