The consensus team advanced the Leios prototype toward the Dijkstra era and finalized the certificate size reduction to 200 bytes. In wallets, Lace 2.0.6 went live, fixing DRep ID message signing for mnemonic wallets and adopting the CIP-129 format. For scaling, Hydra merged its partial fanout feature to eliminate the UTXO limit per head, while Mithril completed circuit key caching for its SNARK library.

The ledger team completed Plutus performance optimizations, while the Smart Contracts team secured funding to extend the "Blaster" verification tool into Aiken. For Leios, treasury funding was approved with 88% support, and a CIP-0164 update reduced certificate size by 40x. Additionally, candidate registration opened for the Constitutional Committee elections.

The consensus team added initial voting capabilities to the Leios prototype and retired the legacy V1 LedgerDB to simplify the API and clear the way for on-disk tables. In wallets, Lace launched on iOS, wrapping up its multi-platform rollout. Additionally, the Mithril team finalized recursive circuit refactoring and off-circuit verification tests for its SNARK prototype.

IO's core teams released Cardano Node v11.0.1 to support the upcoming protocol version 11 intra-era hard fork, while the ledger team advanced preparations for the Dijkstra era. The Plutus team enhanced the UPLC command-line tool, introducing script optimizations that yield over 10% in execution cost savings. In scaling, Hydra v2.1.0 was launched with 7% lower snapshot latency and protocol v12+ compatibility, and Mithril finalized key SNARK circuit validations and standard Schnorr signatures.

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.

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.

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.