Cardano Foundation joins Swiss tokenization group CMTA after its CIP-0113 standard receives recognition for issuing tokenized shares under Swiss rules.
Midnight has passed one million mainnet transactions, with Input Output Group announcing the milestone after Midnight Explorer reported a total of 1,019,963 on Oct. 27. Input Output Group said Midnight mainnet had passed one million transactions in an Oct. 27…
Cardano’s Leios scaling plan has a launch sequence that extends well beyond the hard fork. Input Output’s October 20 roadmap describes a gradual increase in capacity, with operator preparation and live-network evidence between the major steps.
TL;DR
Dijkstra is intended to introduce the rules needed for Leios.
Stake pools must register additional voting keys before the system can operate as planned.
Higher throughput would follow tests and governance-approved parameter changes.
The hard fork creates capability before capacity rises
The published roadmap targets an initial three-to-fivefold increase over the present Praos throughput ceiling, followed by changes aiming for ten to fifteen times that baseline. These are staged targets expressed in transaction kilobytes per second, not a guaranteed count of payments and not an activation date.
Transaction size matters. A simple payment and a complex application transaction do not consume identical space or execution resources. Multiplying one throughput figure by an average transaction size chosen elsewhere can produce a misleading transactions-per-second headline.
The underlying Leios proposal describes additional blocks and certificates that allow more transaction work to be carried while retaining the chain’s ordering process. For users, the promise is ultimately about getting transactions accepted under load, not just producing a larger theoretical maximum.
That is a different scaling route from the testnet gas-limit work in NewsBTC’s Ethereum coverage. Comparisons need to keep execution costs, transaction size and network assumptions visible.
Governance must decide how far to turn the settings
The roadmap puts constitutional guardrails before the hard fork, then operator key registration, mainnet load exercises and subsequent parameter decisions. Its practical implication is that there are several places where rollout can pause without the entire design being abandoned.
A staged process gives operators time to discover whether a higher workload strains their hardware or connections. It also gives voters something more concrete than a target to assess. Measurements at one capacity level can inform the next increase, instead of asking the network to accept every assumption at once.
This is relevant to the resilience questions in NewsBTC’s Solana research coverage. Raising the burden on nodes can change who is able to participate reliably. The quality of propagation and recovery behavior therefore belongs beside raw throughput in any review.
Higher capacity also does not create application demand. NewsBTC’s reporting on Cardano stablecoin liquidity concerns one part of the activity that might use more room. Fees, useful products and a dependable user experience determine whether that room is filled.
The next meaningful milestones are approved parameters, compatible software, registered operator keys and published results from increasingly demanding tests. Those will reveal more than repeating the largest eventual multiplier. Leios is being presented as a controlled expansion of what the network can handle, with the pace to be determined by evidence and governance.
Written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
A new Cardano scaling test has an unusually useful feature: it explains why its headline speed gain is smaller than the biggest numbers attached to the technology. Input Output’s October 22 Hydra report replays a real application workload and measures what changed.
TL;DR
A replay of Midnight claim transactions found roughly 1.9 times the throughput on the newer Hydra version.
The test used the same host and workload to compare software versions.
The result describes that benchmark, not a new transaction-speed figure for all of Cardano.
Real scripts make a tougher benchmark
The Input Output report compared 24,576 generated claim transactions containing the scripts used by its distribution pipeline. Reported throughput rose from 42 to 79 claims per second. Total completion time fell from 590.4 to 339.1 seconds, a reduction of about 43%.
Those measures answer different questions. Throughput describes how much work the system completes over a period; latency describes the wait for an individual transaction; total duration includes the whole run. A single attractive number cannot stand in for all three.
The Hydra protocol documentation explains why the result should not be read as a mainnet benchmark. A Hydra head processes transactions among its own participants and later settles with Cardano. The system reduces the amount of work that must be replicated globally for each application interaction.
This makes the comparison relevant to application builders assessing a specific job. NewsBTC’s earlier coverage of Cardano liquidity growth raises the demand side of that discussion. Here the question is whether a particular execution route can serve users more predictably when activity arrives.
Faster software still needs realistic deployment tests
A controlled replay is valuable because it holds the workload and host steady. That makes a software comparison easier to interpret than two demonstrations run on different hardware with different transaction complexity. It does not recreate every production condition, including dispersed participants, unreliable connections or changing demand.
Script-heavy claims also explain why this benchmark is more informative than a count of empty transfers. An application spends time checking whether a transaction is valid. Removing those checks from a performance test may produce an impressive number while answering a different engineering question.
For a team planning another distribution, a useful next test would reproduce its own scripts, number of participants and expected submission pattern. A faster replay reduces one uncertainty; it does not eliminate the need to check deposits, withdrawals and recovery procedures.
The published result therefore supports a specific conclusion: this claim pipeline completed materially faster on the newer implementation. That is a meaningful improvement without turning it into a universal promise about every transaction Cardano can process.
Written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
Cardano developers now have a public environment for preparing the Dijkstra upgrade, but its name needs careful reading. The test network is available; the transition to Dijkstra’s new protocol rules is still a separate step.
TL;DR
Intersect’s October 24 update says the refreshed Dijkstra testnet became public on October 21.
It currently runs Conway protocol version 11 with node 11.1.3.
A later node prerelease and testnet governance action are needed for protocol version 12.
A live rehearsal environment comes before new rules
The sequence is set out in Intersect’s weekly report and the Cardano Operations Book. Pool operators can obtain configuration files, connect to the test network and use a faucet for test assets. The planned Dijkstra transition follows availability of the 11.2 prerelease and a hard-fork initiation action.
For developers, that staging creates a useful baseline. A wallet or indexer can establish that it handles the present environment correctly before it is asked to interpret changed transaction formats and protocol behavior. If everything changes at once, distinguishing an application bug from a network-upgrade problem becomes much harder.
The published node release provides the actual software reference. A version number in a roadmap should never substitute for checking which release a network configuration requires. Public test assets also have no relationship to the value of mainnet ADA.
NewsBTC has covered the same operational distinction during Ethereum’s Hoodi postponement: being ready for an earlier configuration does not guarantee readiness for the next one.
Readiness is broader than upgrading a pool
Stake pools are one part of the exercise. Exchanges need deposits and withdrawals to remain intelligible, wallets need accurate balances and signatures, and applications need their transactions to be accepted under the intended rules. A testnet gives those teams a shared place to expose mismatches before real assets depend on the answers.
It also changes what observers should measure. The number of announcements about an upgrade says little about whether independent teams have completed their checks. Useful evidence includes compatible releases, successful synchronization, working transaction submission and identified problems that have been fixed.
That is relevant to the adoption questions behind Cardano’s stablecoin activity. An application ecosystem needs reliable infrastructure as well as liquidity. Likewise, the concerns in NewsBTC’s Solana resilience coverage show why network performance is only one part of a usable platform.
The public Dijkstra environment is a tangible preparation milestone. It does not announce a mainnet activation date, establish that every proposed feature is already running, or guarantee a particular ADA price response. Its immediate value is more practical: the next round of compatibility work can happen on a network that other participants can inspect and join.
Written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
Cardano payroll could support ADA salaries and automated payments, but employers must address price volatility, tax obligations, wallet security and compliance.
TL;DR: In a newly published explanation of its European consultation response, the Cardano Foundation argues for regulating activities and intermediaries rather than creating blanket rules for decentralised technology.
The Cardano Foundation has spelled out why it believes Europe’s next round of crypto policymaking should avoid treating every blockchain interaction as a regulated financial service. In an October 21 article, its legal team explained the positions it submitted to the European Commission’s MiCA review.
The response itself was filed on September 30, an important date distinction. The Foundation is not announcing that new laws were passed this week. It is describing the changes it wants policymakers to make as they assess decentralised finance, staking, lending, stablecoins and the practical limits of the existing regulation.
Its argument rests on function and control. An intermediary taking custody or exercising discretion over customer assets is doing something different from a person delegating ADA stake without surrendering custody, or software that simply provides access to a public network.
The Foundation also wants clearer treatment of hybrid tokens, overlaps with other European financial rules and cross-border legal issues. These are lobbying positions, not binding exemptions. The significance for Cardano is that staking and permissionless infrastructure sit near the centre of the EU debate over who, precisely, should face financial-services obligations.
Written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
TL;DR: Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson says he is personally developing a programming language that combines transaction intents, proof-carrying data and Groth16 proofs.
Charles Hoskinson is returning to the keyboard. The Cardano founder says he is working directly on a new programming language with Input Output Global engineer Lucas Rosa, aimed at making complex blockchain actions easier to express and verify.
His description brings together three ideas. Transaction intents describe what a user wants to achieve without forcing them to specify every execution step. Proof-carrying data attaches evidence that a computation or action meets certain rules. Groth16 proofs are compact cryptographic proofs that can be checked efficiently.
In principle, those pieces could give Cardano developers another way to build applications that coordinate actions and verify results without putting every underlying calculation on-chain.
There is a major caveat: Hoskinson has not publicly released a finished specification, a name for the language or a timetable for general developer access. A social-media announcement about work in progress is not a new production programming environment.
Cardano already supports tools such as Plutus and Aiken, while the separate Midnight privacy network uses its own developer tooling. A new language would have to demonstrate practical advantages, workable security and a developer experience good enough to encourage adoption.
The idea is ambitious. The unanswered question is how it moves from Hoskinson’s description to publicly reviewable code that builders can actually use.
Written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
TL;DR: Cardano is highlighting a 12-team Catalyst pilot in which much of the grant funding depends on real adoption rather than merely launching a project.
Crypto grant programmes have a familiar problem: it’s easier to count funded ideas than products anyone actually uses. Cardano’s Project Catalyst has been trying a different approach with its 2026 pilot cohort, which is now being highlighted again by the ecosystem.
The original selection announcement came on September 24. Twelve teams were chosen from 117 applications, covering areas including stablecoin payments, lending, programmable tokens, identity and supply-chain applications. The pool was designed around roughly two million ADA in grant funding.
The more interesting detail is how teams get paid. Catalyst says 40% of an approved grant is released after onboarding, while the rest is linked to adoption targets and continued use. That asks recipients to demonstrate something after deployment, rather than treating a completed build as the final measure of success.
The programme also involved 52 active community curators, with specialist reviewers examining the business and technical case for applications.
None of that proves that the selected projects will succeed. There is a difference between promising measurable use and demonstrating it on-chain, and the pilot will ultimately be judged on the latter.
Still, the funding model gives Cardano a concrete experiment to watch: can distributing ADA on the basis of usage deliver better outcomes than the traditional grant cycle?
Written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
TL;DR: Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson says he is personally developing a programming language that combines transaction intents, proof-carrying data and Groth16 proofs.
Charles Hoskinson is returning to the keyboard. The Cardano founder says he is working directly on a new programming language with Input Output Global engineer Lucas Rosa, aimed at making complex blockchain actions easier to express and verify.
His description brings together three ideas. Transaction intents describe what a user wants to achieve without forcing them to specify every execution step. Proof-carrying data attaches evidence that a computation or action meets certain rules. Groth16 proofs are compact cryptographic proofs that can be checked efficiently.
In principle, those pieces could give Cardano developers another way to build applications that coordinate actions and verify results without putting every underlying calculation on-chain.
There is a major caveat: Hoskinson has not publicly released a finished specification, a name for the language or a timetable for general developer access. A social-media announcement about work in progress is not a new production programming environment.
Cardano already supports tools such as Plutus and Aiken, while the separate Midnight privacy network uses its own developer tooling. A new language would have to demonstrate practical advantages, workable security and a developer experience good enough to encourage adoption.
The idea is ambitious. The unanswered question is how it moves from Hoskinson’s description to publicly reviewable code that builders can actually use.
Written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
TL;DR: Cardano is highlighting a 12-team Catalyst pilot in which much of the grant funding depends on real adoption rather than merely launching a project.
Crypto grant programmes have a familiar problem: it’s easier to count funded ideas than products anyone actually uses. Cardano’s Project Catalyst has been trying a different approach with its 2026 pilot cohort, which is now being highlighted again by the ecosystem.
The original selection announcement came on September 24. Twelve teams were chosen from 117 applications, covering areas including stablecoin payments, lending, programmable tokens, identity and supply-chain applications. The pool was designed around roughly two million ADA in grant funding.
The more interesting detail is how teams get paid. Catalyst says 40% of an approved grant is released after onboarding, while the rest is linked to adoption targets and continued use. That asks recipients to demonstrate something after deployment, rather than treating a completed build as the final measure of success.
The programme also involved 52 active community curators, with specialist reviewers examining the business and technical case for applications.
None of that proves that the selected projects will succeed. There is a difference between promising measurable use and demonstrating it on-chain, and the pilot will ultimately be judged on the latter.
Still, the funding model gives Cardano a concrete experiment to watch: can distributing ADA on the basis of usage deliver better outcomes than the traditional grant cycle?
Written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
TL;DR:Stablecoins issued or circulating on Cardano reached roughly $70.2 million in DefiLlama’s October 18 snapshot, up about 31% over 30 days. USDC represents nearly two-thirds of that total.
Cardano’s stablecoin market has crossed another small but notable threshold. DefiLlama’s October 18 figures put the network’s dollar-pegged token supply at approximately $70.2 million, with 30-day growth of about 31%.
USDC accounts for most of the balance. The tracker lists around $44.5 million in USD Coin on Cardano, equivalent to roughly 63.5% of all stablecoins it follows there. Moneta’s USDM contributes about $13.5 million, while RealFi USDrf and Anzens USDA make up smaller portions of the total.
For an ecosystem seeking deeper decentralized finance markets, stablecoin supply is an important ingredient. Traders and lenders need liquid assets that can serve as a common dollar unit, and developers often rely on them to support borrowing, payments and settlement.
But supply is not the same thing as usage. An increase in circulating stablecoins does not prove that the same value is trading regularly, that lending applications are earning more revenue, or that demand for ADA is rising. Those are separate questions requiring transaction and protocol data.
The change also comes from a relatively modest base compared with the stablecoin markets on Ethereum and other larger networks. Percentages can look dramatic when the starting number is small.
Still, the growth gives Cardano applications more dollar-denominated liquidity to work with. The next milestone will be demonstrating that additional balances are being used productively rather than simply parked on-chain.
Cardano’s governance process has approved new treasury allocations for ecosystem and infrastructure work in the supplied September 22 governance update.
The funding is expected to be released in stages tied to project milestones.
The vote reflects the network’s Voltaire-era governance model rather than a Cardano Foundation unilateral grant.
Cardano’s onchain governance system has approved a new round of treasury allocations aimed at infrastructure and ecosystem development, giving the network another live test of its Voltaire-era decision process.
The important part is not only where the ADA goes.
It is how the decision gets made.
Treasury Funding Moves Through Governance
Cardano has spent years building toward a model where ecosystem funding and protocol decisions are increasingly handled through formal community governance.
The latest allocations put that framework to work.
Approved funding is aimed at core infrastructure and developer-focused initiatives, with disbursement structured around milestones rather than one unconditional transfer.
That approach is designed to give governance participants more oversight over whether funded projects actually deliver.
It also makes the treasury a strategic tool rather than simply a pool of ADA waiting to be spent.
Passing A Vote Is Only The Start
Approval does not mean every ADA allocation is immediately released.
Milestone-based funding creates an additional layer between governance approval and full payment.
That is worth emphasizing because treasury votes can otherwise sound like instant transfers.
The broader significance is that Cardano’s governance architecture is now being used for real resource allocation.
That creates the same opportunities and problems faced by other DAOs: voter participation, accountability, technical complexity and the risk of funding projects that fail to produce useful results.
The difference is scale.
Cardano’s treasury and governance system are intended to support a large base-layer ecosystem rather than a single DeFi application.
The latest funding round will therefore be watched as much for execution as for the vote itself.
Voltaire governance becomes meaningful only if approved projects turn treasury capital into infrastructure and applications that users actually value.
Cardano’s approach also differs from governance systems where a small protocol treasury is controlled by a relatively narrow group of token holders. The ambition here is to use governance as a recurring layer for ecosystem-wide funding decisions. That makes process quality important: voters need enough information to judge proposals, milestones need to be measurable and unsuccessful projects need consequences. If those controls work, the treasury can become a long-term growth engine. If they do not, a large funding pool can just as easily become a source of waste and political friction inside the ecosystem.
This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
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