Over the past few weeks, the ledger team added new features, improved transaction fee estimation, and fixed various bugs. The Marlowe team benchmarked contract lifecycles, added Merkleized contract examples, and updated the Marlowe Run web application. The Hydra team improved workflows, addressed schema consistency, and enhanced log schema tests. Mithril enabled direct certificate verification, supported Conway era, and upgraded infrastructure. Voltaire continued Conway era development and updated SanchoNet documentation. Project Catalyst concluded the moderation period for community review, with voting starting January 25. The education team planned activities and updated the Haskell Bootcamp course.

This week, the core technology teams released node v.8.7.3, fixing an outbound-governor issue and enhancing query versioning. The Lace team released v.1.8 with bug fixes and new features. Plutus tools improved synchronization and memory usage for Marconi and added new primitives for Plutus v3. Hydra completed Conway support and enhanced off-chain code. Mithril enabled direct certificate verification and improved node communications. Voltaire development continued with governance and constitution preparations. Project Catalyst held its first town hall and progressed Fund11 through the community review stage. The education team planned yearly activities and Mastering Cardano publication options.