Cardano Development: New Updates on Ledger Safety, Wallet Enhancements, and Smart Contracts

• The Cardano Foundation’s latest development report highlights significant advancements across core technology, smart contracts, wallets, and services.
• Cardano CEO Charles Hoskinson announced that the network is approaching a major milestone with the Cardano Node reaching version 9.0.

The Cardano Foundation has shared a weekly development report on key changes that took place within the Cardano ecosystem. Moreover, the improvements have been across core technology, smart contracts, wallets, and services, as well as other verticals.

Last week, the Cardano ledger team made significant advancements by enhancing the correctness of the CDDL specification and improving safety by restricting certain protocol parameter types. Additionally, they introduced tools for managing test case distribution, worked on UTXO predicate failure tests, enabled retries for flaky tests in nightly CI, and implemented further fixes and improvements.

Similarly, the Cardano Lace team has released version 1.12, featuring several improvements and a major new addition—a fiat on-ramp with Banxa, a third-party service. Users can now fund their wallets with fiat currencies through this service. The release also supports multi-delegation for compatible hardware wallets and offers an improved staking pool search.

On the other hand, the Plutus team has released version 1.29.0.0 of the Plutus libraries, marking the first Conway-ready Plutus release, as reported by the Cardano Foundation. This version includes the implementation of CIP-69 and CIP-117, among other features and improvements.

Cardano Foundation CEO – June Will Be A Special Month

This week, the Mithril team made significant strides in implementing the certification of Cardano transactions within Mithril networks. They enhanced the throughput of the aggregator’s prover route by incorporating resource pooling and advanced low-latency certification by transitioning to a chain point-based beacon, enabling faster transaction signing.

Additionally, they investigated performance bottlenecks in the prover, addressed a bug causing unsigned transactions to appear as signed, and continued implementing transaction import using the ChainSync mini-protocol and Pallas.

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has announced that June is expected to mark the achievement of a significant milestone for the Cardano network, with the Cardano Node reaching version 9.0, per the Crypto News Flash report. This advancement signifies that the network is Chang fork-ready, pending the installation of the new node by 70% of the Stake Pool Operators (SPOs). Once this threshold is met, a hard fork will propel the network into the Age of Voltaire.

“This is the most significant milestone in the history of Cardano and for the industry as a whole,” said Hoskinson.

Cardano will become a decentralized civilization spanning the entire world with millions of residents. We’ll have the most advanced blockchain governance system, annual budgets, a treasury, and the wisdom of our entire community to guide us.

Reflecting on the journey, Hoskinson remarked:

It’s been nearly ten years for some of us on this remarkable journey. I can’t believe that in a single decade, we built a nation. I’m proud of all of you. Cardano gives me hope for our industry and the world. Let’s spend the next decade making a big dent in the universe.