Intersect board election results have been announced, with Adam Rusch and Jack Briggs elected as new members. This milestone marks the first time a majority of the board is directly elected by its members, achieved with a 26% voter turnout to reinforce decentralized, community-led governance.

The consensus team is auditing the KES agent and refactoring the hard fork combinator for Peras-awareness. The Plutus team is enabling sums-of-products and built-in functions for the upcoming intra-era hard fork. Meanwhile, IOG and zkFold have partnered for a trustless ETH-Cardano bridge, and Minswap's "Wen" token generator is now live.

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 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 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 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 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.

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.

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.