The September 26, 2025, development report highlights the consensus team's work on the KES agent audit and refactoring the hard fork combinator to be Peras-aware. The Plutus team is preparing for the intra-era hard fork by enabling sums-of-products and built-in functions across all Plutus versions. In the ecosystem, IOG announced a partnership with zkFold to build a trustless ETH-Cardano bridge, while Minswap's "Wen" token generator is now live.

On September 23, 2025, 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 September 19, 2025, development report highlights 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 from September 17, 2025, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.