The consensus team advanced the Leios prototype by migrating flags to the Praos header, launching a dedicated testnet, and pre-releasing Cardano Node v11.0. In scaling, Hydra optimized benchmark performance for high transaction volumes, while Mithril completed data encoding and state transition tests for its recursive SNARK prototype. Additionally, the research team officially submitted their proposal on-chain.

The Cardano Foundation and the University of Brasília (UnB) have partnered to launch Latin America’s first Cardano Project Development Lab. Focused on blockchain, AI, and IoT, the hub will drive public sector innovation. The collaboration includes academic curricula and policymaker training to enhance transparency and digital trust across Brazil's government.

This report marks the launch of IO’s 2026 treasury proposals on the official proposals website, accompanied by the Q4 2025 – Q1 2026 delivery report detailing recent technical milestones. The consensus team continues to advance the Ouroboros Leios prototype, while the Mithril team focuses on implementing succinct proofs (SNARKs) to enhance network scaling. In governance, the Intersect committee elections conclude their voting phase today, May 1, marking a key step in decentralized decision-making for the ecosystem.

Nine 2026 treasury proposals from IO are now live, focusing on scalability and performance with DRep voting open until May 24. The consensus team advanced the Leios prototype by adding throughput metrics and investigating storage latency to ensure protocol stability. A significant update from the Plutus team introduced script optimizations for the UPLC executable, which can reduce execution costs by an average of 10%. Additionally, the Mithril team prepared for SNARK circuit production readiness, while Intersect committee elections are underway with 105 candidates competing for 37 seats.

Intersect is shifting to a flexible 2026 strategy focused on five pillars, including infrastructure stewardship. Key to this is a new 3% administration fee, replacing flat budgets to provide on-demand support for treasury projects. They also launched the Administration Hub for transparency and are preparing for a multi-client future to boost network resilience.

Nine 2026 treasury proposals have been finalized, outlining the roadmap for Cardano’s core protocol and scaling initiatives. Technical teams successfully integrated Leios endorser blocks and optimized Node v10.7 for the upcoming Van Rossem hard fork. Innovation continues with a new decentralized AI and healthcare lab in Greece, while the Intersect committee elections move into the voting phase on April 20.

The High Assurance team released PlutusCoreBlaster, a full formalization of Plutus Core in Lean 4 for enhanced smart contract verification. The Plutus team improved compiler usability and added UPLC optimizations to increase execution efficiency. Mithril completed the review of its recursive SNARK circuit prototype and finalized the client CLI for Cardano blocks. Lastly, Intersect noted only seven days remain for 2026 committee election applications, closing April 17.

The performance and benchmarking team ran benchmarks on node v.10.6.2 and began developing tx-centrifuge, a service for generating high network workloads. Lace reached a major milestone by integrating Midnight mainnet access, allowing users to manage private assets directly in the wallet. Mithril successfully activated the SNARK prover on a developer network, while Intersect opened applications for the 2026 committee elections, with seats available across seven standing committees until April 17.

The Pentad has transitioned to delivering Critical Integrations, headlined by the live launch of USDCx, which boosted Cardano's stablecoin supply by 40%. Pyth Network oracles are now code-complete for a Q2 launch, while Dune Analytics and LayerZero integrations are currently in progress. Furthermore, the design phase for Pentad V2 has begun, focusing on expanding infrastructure and capital flow.

The networking and consensus teams supported the node v.10.7.0 release and progressed on the Peras protocol, including on-chain certificate tracking. Mithril completed the Halo2 circuit and SNARK aggregation primitives, while Hydra advanced the partial fanout and directly open heads features. Additionally, Professor Aggelos Kiayias was named a 2026 IACR Fellow for his cryptographic contributions.