Key points
- Four engineering functions that keep Cardano reliable, fast, and easy to build on are moving from IO Labs to ICAN Group, a specialist engineering firm.
- The same teams and the same leader move together, so the systems they look after stay with the engineers who know them best.
- ICAN Group is led by Can Huzmeli, who has run these functions inside IO for the past three years.
- For ICAN, this work is the whole business rather than a support role inside a larger company, which means more dedicated focus over time.
- Nothing pauses. The work carries on, coordinated in the open through Intersect.
- This is the next step in Cardano's wider shift toward being built by many independent teams.
Cardano's protocol is decentralized. Its governance is decentralized. Increasingly, so is the engineering that keeps the network running. Today, four engineering functions that have lived inside Input Output (IO) move to a dedicated home at ICAN Group: Platform Engineering, Quality Assurance, Cryptography, Performance & Tracing. The teams, their leadership, and the knowledge they have built over years move together.
This follows a pattern the community already knows. Daedalus wallet development went to Se7en Labs. The Mithril workstream went to Teragone. Each move places a specialist team in focused ownership of the part of Cardano it knows best, and each one widens the base of people building the network. ICAN Group is the next.
What is moving
Four functions move to ICAN Group:
- Platform Engineering builds and runs the internal platforms that Cardano's engineering teams rely on every day. Its site reliability engineering (SRE) team keeps those platforms stable and available, and holds them to clear reliability targets so the ecosystem can build with confidence.
- Quality Assurance is the testing work that catches issues before users ever meet them.
- Cryptography is the engineering behind how the network keeps value and data secure.
- Performance & Tracing (P&T) handles the measurement and profiling that keep Cardano fast and its behavior observable.
Between them, these teams carry the disciplines Can Huzmeli has led inside IO. All of it moves as one, under the leadership it has had for three years.
Why ICAN Group
ICAN Group is a London-headquartered engineering and transformation firm founded in 2015, and the umbrella for ICAN Consultancy and two product ventures, Ethscore and TroveTrade. Three things make it the right home for this work.
The first is continuity of leadership. Can Huzmeli, ICAN's founder, scaled and ran these teams inside IO, so nothing is lost in translation. He brings 21 years of software delivery and engineering leadership across Web3, biopharma, fintech, adtech, FMCG, and e-commerce, including leading 140-person engineering organizations through cloud transformation and directing a €100M global agile transformation. The engineers who understand the systems keep working on them, for a leader who already knows them well.
The second is focus. Inside a larger organization, reliability, quality, performance, and cryptographic engineering are supporting functions. At ICAN, they are the entire business. Taking ownership of important systems that sit outside a client's core roadmap is one of ICAN's flagship services, the work it describes as freeing a company's best people to do what only they can.
The third is how ICAN works. It ships its own production software to hold itself to the standards it brings to clients: Ethscore, a machine-learning platform that scores Ethereum wallets for fraud risk, went live in 16 days, and TroveTrade, an agentic AI fintech platform, in a seven-day sprint. Its consulting record runs on the same instinct: ICAN restructured a $40M technology estate back to profit within 12 months, migrated a large engineering organization to AWS while cutting operational costs by 25%, and scaled platforms to 10,000 transactions per second and 1.3 million users.
It runs what it operates to the same discipline. ICAN works to service-level objectives with around-the-clock operations, and it tracks the flow of work through metrics such as cycle time and deployment frequency rather than the behavior of individuals.
Part of a wider shift
Cardano set out to decentralize far more than its ledger. Its governance runs through the community that decides how the treasury is used. Its blocks are produced across thousands of independent stake pools. The engineering that builds and maintains Cardano is on the same path, moving from a single organization toward a growing network of specialist teams, each accountable for the part it knows best and each building in the open.
ICAN Group joins Se7en Labs and Teragone in that network. The transition is coordinated openly through Intersect, the same way the rest of Cardano's engineering decentralization has been. The result is a broader base of independent builders, all working on one open network. The components keep the same engineers who know them best, and the work continues without a pause.
Learn more about IO Labs
The move to ICAN Group is one piece of a larger picture. IO Labs is where that picture lives: the research, applied engineering, and production work behind the node, Plutus, Hydra, Daedalus, and the rest of the stack, with more of it owned by specialist teams each quarter, all coordinated through Intersect. To see how the network is taking shape and what ships next, visit IO Labs.
