As part of its evolving approach to community collaboration, IOR hosted the June 2025 Cardano R&D session as a thematic, livestreamed panel discussion on Layer 2 Expansion: Beyond Hydra. The event spotlighted a series of leading layer 2 innovations being developed across the Cardano ecosystem, exploring scaling solutions that extend far beyond the Hydra Head protocol.

IOR has…

Blockchain systems operate at the intersection of cryptography and economic incentives, combining security mechanisms with game-theoretic principles to safeguard digital assets worth billions of dollars. At the heart of this security lie cryptographic techniques and, crucially, consensus algorithms that maintain a globally consistent ledger by receiving, sequencing, and…

Cardano is a third-generation blockchain platform built on years of rigorous research and developed with complex technical components, including the Ouroboros consensus protocol and the extended UTXO (EUTXO) ledger model.

While the research and formal methods have provided a strong foundation, understanding the details of how Cardano works can be challenging for some community…

SPOs are the beating heart of Cardano — the network’s backbone on which the ecosystem expands. As we scale and grow, it’s essential that we support not just users, builders, and governance innovators, but also the SPOs who’ve helped carry the chain for half a decade.

As part of the Cardano 2025 Budget, IOR joined the monthly SPOs call on May 1 to present the relevant R&D…

As the Cardano ecosystem matures in 2025 and beyond, improving the core node software is one of several priorities for strengthening the network infrastructure. Introducing multiple, diverse node implementations – built by different teams and in different programming languages – can improve network resilience, reduce systemic risk, and better reflect the principles of…