Explore the stories below for curated news, stories, and inspiration from within the Cardano ecosystem.
Alex Nemish and Oleksii Khodakivskyi from Lantr introduce Scalus, a smart contract framework built with Scala 3. They walk through the vision, roadmap, and show how it simplifies development on Cardano, including a live demo of a payment splitter contract. This session is ideal for devs exploring new tools to build on Cardano.
The April 11, 2025, development report highlights Cardano’s steady growth with 1,990 projects, 1.33 million delegated wallets, and 10.75 million native tokens. Smart contracts reached 130,282 Plutus and 6,217 Aiken scripts, with 108.36 million total transactions. Governance participation expanded to 1,238 DReps. Highlights include Charles Hoskinson’s keynote at Paris Blockchain Week, a node diversity workshop, and Draper University selecting 20 builders for its residency. Zekret Protocol will build on Cardano, and Eternl wallet launched a new version with UI upgrades and multi-sig support.
EMURGO's recent workshops in Tokyo and Fukuoka highlighted key challenges to Cardano's commercialization: limited liquidity, low transaction volume, and underdeveloped DeFi infrastructure. With Cardano ranking 20th in total value locked (TVL) among blockchains and its stablecoin market cap at $30 million, the ecosystem lags behind competitors. Contributing factors include scarce listings of Cardano-native tokens on major exchanges and minimal engagement with external market makers. Addressing these issues is crucial for enhancing Cardano's infrastructure, attracting institutional capital, and achieving its vision of a resilient, inclusive financial platform. EMURGO plans to propose solutions in an upcoming blog post.
The Cardano Foundation published an article explaining the Net Change Limit (NCL), a constitutional parameter within Cardano's governance framework. The NCL defines the maximum amount of ada that can be withdrawn from the treasury over a specific period, typically annually. This mechanism serves as a crucial safeguard for fiscal responsibility and long-term treasury sustainability, balancing ecosystem funding needs with monetary stability. Ratification of the NCL via DRep vote is a required step before budget proposals and treasury withdrawals can proceed.
The April 4, 2025, development report highlights Cardano’s continued growth, with 1,991 projects building on the network, 1.329 million delegated wallets, and 10.77 million native tokens issued. Smart contracts reached 130,036 Plutus scripts, and on-chain transactions totaled 108.10 million. Governance engagement expanded to 1,230 DReps, including 927 active. Notable updates include Input Output's participation in Paris Blockchain Week, Turn Protocol's public testnet launch for privacy DeFi, LCX's submission of the first MiCA-compliant white paper for Cardano, and the upcoming release of Cexplorer 2.0 with a new backend and refreshed design.
The March 31, 2025, Cardano Community Digest features Martin Lang's update on the Calidus Pool Key, introducing a streamlined approach for pool-key management, now fully supported by Typhon Wallet, with more integrations forthcoming. The digest also recaps recent global Cardano meetups in Ghana, Brisbane, Vietnam, and a Korea-Japan collaboration, highlighting the community's active engagement worldwide. Additionally, it discusses Cexplorer's latest blog on the importance of scalability for Cardano's future and EMURGO's deep dive into decentralized blockchain governance. These developments underscore Cardano's ongoing innovation and the vibrant participation of its global community.
Giovanni Gargiulo, Senior Software Engineer at the Cardano Foundation, shares how ecosystem engineering supports Cardano’s growth. The session covers DevOps practices behind scalability, security, and uptime, along with challenges of running decentralized infrastructure. Giovanni also touches on infrastructure evolution, global adoption, and what’s ahead for Cardano engineering.
The March 28, 2025, development report highlights Cardano’s growth with 1.329 million delegated wallets, 10.73 million native tokens, and 131,200 Plutus scripts. On-chain transactions reached 108.35 million. Governance participation includes 1,220 DReps. Notable updates include Lace's release of version 1.21.0, Hydra's advancements in multi-party state channels, and Mithril's work on enhanced aggregator decentralization. The Cardano Foundation continues expanding its Venture Hub, onboarding projects like BlockSmith Labs and GreenChain.
Decentralized blockchain governance empowers communities through transparent voting, proposals, and consensus mechanisms. Key components include Delegated Representatives (DReps), protocol upgrades, treasury systems, and structured decision-making processes. Effective governance ensures accountability, adaptability, and resilience, supporting ecosystem growth and sustainability. Cardano’s model emphasizes community involvement, decentralized control, and transparent governance to enhance network security, innovation, and long-term success.
The article "An Introduction to Proof of Stake Blockchain Systems" from the Cardano Foundation explains how proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanisms offer a more energy-efficient and decentralized alternative to proof-of-work (PoW) systems. In PoS, validators are selected based on the amount of cryptocurrency they hold and are willing to "stake" as collateral, reducing the need for energy-intensive computations. The article discusses various PoS models, including Cardano's Ouroboros protocol, which uses a verifiable random function to ensure fairness and security. It also highlights how different PoS systems balance decentralization, security, and scalability to meet diverse blockchain needs.
