Cardano News

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 first community-led Constitutional Committee election has concluded, with seven members elected via an on-chain vote by DReps and SPOs. The process utilized a one-lovelace-one-vote system to select representatives responsible for upholding the Cardano Constitution for the upcoming term. This milestone establishes a decentralized governance framework and marks the full transition of constitutional power to the community.

The 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 video recap showcases the events in Las Vegas, highlighting community collaboration and ecosystem progress. An analysis explores the benefits of liquid staking, focusing on how it balances network security with user autonomy. Leios is detailed as a significant scalability milestone for the network's future. Additionally, an on-chain version of a popular game was demonstrated using Hydra to illustrate high-speed transaction capabilities.

Research and development efforts focus on transforming foundational studies into practical advancements using a structured, evidence-based methodology. Recent progress includes Ouroboros Peras for achieving fast finality and Ouroboros Leios to enable high throughput. Additionally, the Cardinal protocol is being developed as a trust-minimized bridge between Bitcoin and the network to ensure robust and scalable interoperability.

Intersect has deployed the first on-chain vendor smart contract, funding a proposal from TxPipe. This marks a significant milestone for Cardano's treasury management, moving from a theoretical framework to practical implementation. The contract holds the approved ada budget in escrow and automates milestone-based payments. This new system ensures transparent, secure, and accountable management of community-approved funds, representing a major step forward for decentralized governance.

The Halo2-Plutus verifier is an open-source tool designed to bring zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) to the network. Developed by Input | Output Research, it enables on-chain verification of Halo2 proofs within Plinth smart contracts. This innovation enhances privacy and scalability, with its primary application being the Midnight-Cardano zk-bridge, while also supporting confidential transactions.

The ledger team is focused on enforcing stake pool VRF key uniqueness and integrating Plutus V4 into the Dijkstra era. Plutus Core has added support for built-in lists, while Midnight partnered with Copper for institutional custody of the NIGHT token. Additionally, the Governance Education Working Group has launched, and the Halo2-Plutus verifier is now available to support on-chain zero-knowledge proofs, primarily for the Midnight-Cardano zk-bridge.

The 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.

The ledger team is working on enforcing stake pool VRF key uniqueness and integrating Plutus V4 into the Dijkstra era. Plutus Core has added support for built-in lists, while Midnight partnered with Copper for institutional custody. Additionally, the Governance Education Working Group has launched, and the Halo2-Plutus verifier is now available to support on-chain zero-knowledge proofs.