Cardano News

A set of frequently asked questions about the recent Valentine upgrade. It introduces built-in functions for ECDSA and Schnorr signatures alongside Cardano's native signature system, facilitating efficient cross-chain applications. This upgrade, requiring a focused hard fork, maintains the ledger era while expanding developer tools for secure and versatile DApp creation. It leverages popular cryptographic standards to enhance Cardano's usability and interoperability with other blockchains, ensuring high security through expert audits.

Since December 2022, the Hydra project has made progress on several fronts. The team focused on aligning the implementation with the HeadV1 protocol specification, addressing gaps in the on-chain scripts, and improving the mutation test framework. The roadmap was slightly updated, with new items like creating a use case-centric roadmap. Community efforts include the Hydra for Voting project and a lite paper on Hydra for auctions. The team also outlined key themes for 2023, including achieving mainnet maturity, increasing adoption, and promoting sustainable open-source development. The goal is to position Hydra as a maintainable, community-driven project.

The Cardano Foundation focuses on transparency, governance, and accountability in blockchain, emphasizing the importance of widespread access to information for full realization. It drives the adoption of the Cardano blockchain as a foundational layer for future financial and social systems through three core areas: operational resilience, education, and adoption.

The Cardano Foundation has announced today the appointment of Andreas Pletscher as its Chief Operating Officer (COO) and Nicolas Jacquemart as its Chief Legal Officer (CLO). Pletscher joins the Foundation from PwC while Jacquemart joins from FINMA, the Swiss financial market supervisory authority.

We interviewed the NEWM team, a blockchain-based project aiming to create a music ecosystem that allows musicians to own their creative content and monetize their art from conception to retirement. Including a streaming platform, music rights marketplace, micropayments, ticketing, and fractionalization of IP rights, focusing on user-friendly design and technology using the Cardano blockchain.

Since November 2022, the Hydra project has made notable progress. The team completed the validation of the coordinated head protocol against a formal model and detailed a follow-up task on model-based testing. They focused on closing gaps in the specification to support an audit, scoped down version 0.9.0 to script updates, and moved the "Commit from external wallet" feature to the next version. Development highlights include fixing errors in the internal wallet, reducing commit costs using reference scripts, and improving CI with nix-based builds. The Hydra V1 specification is being formalized in LaTeX, and the community projects "Hydra for Payments" and "Hydra for Voting" have advanced, with the former completing its first phase. The Cardano Foundation also published a retrospective blog post on Hydra's progress in 2022.

For the January edition of the Spotlight Article, we interviewed James Dunseith, Co-Founder of Gimbalabs.

The Hydra Head Protocol, is a layer-2 scalability solution for Cardano, enabling the creation of off-chain ledgers for more efficient blockchain use. Developed as a joint effort by the Cardano Foundation and IOG, Hydra facilitates fast, private transactions within small networks (Hydra Heads) that later settle results on the Cardano mainchain. It's designed to be isomorphic, meaning transactions within Hydra Heads have the same capabilities as those on Cardano, but without the need for stake pools, ensuring full consensus among participants. Hydra aims to improve Cardano's scalability and efficiency, supporting a variety of use cases like payments, games, and marketplaces, with a focus on adoption and integration by developers.

Since October 2022, the Hydra team released versions 0.8.0 and 0.8.1, introducing persistence and improving user experience. The roadmap now focuses on finalizing the Hydra V1 specification and preparing for an audit. Key projects include Hydra for Payments and Hydra for Voting, with progress in formal verification and product demonstrations. The team rebranded the repository to reflect its maturity and held a workshop to set new goals for 2023.

For the September Spotlight Article, we interviewed people from ADAO. Their mission is to build open-source tools, educational and supportive resources to empower robust, decentralized systems of collaboration and governance, starting with Cardano