Blog > 2025
Strengthening Cardano's foundations: Q3 2025 progress report
From scalability and interoperability to oversight and assurance, IOE teams are focused on strengthening Cardano’s foundations while ensuring transparency and accountability
29 October 2025 8 mins read
Summary:
- Q3 2025 saw steady progress across IOE projects, with a strong focus on scalability, assurance, and community collaboration
- UTXO-HD reached key integration milestones for efficient ledger storage, while Leios advanced through its first CIP and ecosystem prototypes
- Plutus Core v.1.50.0.0 delivered major tooling and performance updates, and the Cardano High Assurance team…
Scaling Cardano applications with Hydra
Hydra v1 is out, marking a significant step toward scalable, low-latency Cardano applications ready for real-world deployment
27 October 2025 6 mins read
Summary:
- Hydra v1 marks a significant milestone: the protocol is now production-ready
- It enables low-latency, off-chain transaction processing while maintaining Cardano’s security guarantees
- The latest release introduces a feature-complete Hydra Head protocol and major stability, interoperability, and API improvements
- It’s now validated through real-world use in Midnight’s Glacier…
Leios monthly spotlight: September highlights
Leios reaches a major milestone as the project transitions from research to engineering, outlining the path toward specifications, conformance, and a public testnet
23 October 2025 5 mins read
Summary:
- Leios has transitioned from Input | Output Research to Input | Output Engineering
- Clarifications and cost analyses are underway following constructive feedback for CIP-0164
- A simulator bug was identified and fixed, leading to improved results
- Impact analysis suggests minimal disruption to most Cardano ecosystem systems from the proposed design
- Blink Labs (Go) made progress…
Introducing Ouroboros Phalanx – breaking the economics of grinding attacks
Phalanx aims to enhance Ouroboros with stronger randomness generation, preventing grinding attacks and delivering faster, more reliable transaction settlement
22 October 2025 9 mins read
Summary:
- Ouroboros Phalanx strengthens Cardano’s consensus foundation by addressing a subtle but important vulnerability in randomness generation known as grinding attacks
- By introducing verifiable delay functions (VDFs) and extending how randomness is built across epochs, Phalanx makes such attacks exponentially more costly and practically infeasible
- This upgrade not only…
Always secure and safer than ever, thanks to next-level smart contract verification on Cardano
Traditional smart contract verification checks high-level code and trusts the compiler. In this second blog post in the formal verification series, we explain how we can verify the actual compiled bytecode that runs on-chain, catching bugs that other approaches miss
14 October 2025 12 mins read
It is now possible to formally verify smart contracts at the exact level they execute on Cardano nodes – working directly with Untyped Plutus Core (UPLC) rather than reasoning over abstract models or surface loop.
By directly targeting UPLC, contracts can be verified regardless of the source language, including Plinth, Aiken, Plutarch, or any future language that targets the…
Recent posts
Strengthening Cardano's foundations: Q3 2025 progress report by Olga Hryniuk
29 October 2025
Scaling Cardano applications with Hydra by Olga Hryniuk
27 October 2025
Leios monthly spotlight: September highlights by Emmanuel Ameh
23 October 2025