Cardano’s Bullish Strides: A Look at the Latest Development Update

The latest #cardano weekly development update, published on June 9, 2023, by Input Output (IOG), reveals some exciting progress in the Cardano ecosystem. The report highlights advancements in core technology, smart contracts, scaling, governance, and more. Here are the most bullish aspects of the report.

The core technology teams have been diligently working on node, networking, consensus, and ledger components, ensuring the robustness of Cardano’s underlying technology. The Lace team has made significant strides in multi-delegation scope, stake distribution reporting, and a new input selection algorithm for partitioning UTXOs according to user staking preferences. This progress is crucial for enhancing the user experience and functionality of the Cardano network.

In the realm of smart contracts, the Plutus team has finalized the Marconi EpochSDD and MintBurn indexer, and separated the mocked node from the Plutus PAB. The addition of BLS12-381 primitives to Plutus Core is a significant step forward, with 17 built-in functions added to Plutus Core, set to be available after the Conway hard fork.

The Basho phase, focusing on scaling, has seen the Hydra team making substantial progress in solving various issues, including the investigation of problems with a head on mainnet. The Mithril team has also been working on implementing a new sub-command for restoring Mithril stake distribution in the client, a key development for Cardano’s scalability.

In the Voltaire phase, conversations continue on CIP-1694 to establish an initial Minimum Viable Governance (MVG) framework. This framework is crucial for the advancement of participatory governance within the Cardano ecosystem, a bullish sign for the community’s involvement in shaping Cardano’s future.

Project Catalyst, Cardano’s experiment in community innovation, has seen the completion of its 500th project, a testament to the vibrant and active community driving Cardano’s development. The Catalyst team has introduced several new features, including a milestone-based funding module, a continuous testnet, a new challenge-setting process, and voting app improvements.

Per Essential Cardano’s report, Cardano has successfully launched 129 projects, generated more than 8.39 million native tokens, and executed 8,555 Plutus scripts. Further testament to Cardano’s dynamism is the striking figure of 1,246 projects currently being actively developed on its platform. Moreover, the network has demonstrated its power and reliability, having processed 68.5 million transactions.