The first Cardano R&D session of 2026 was held recently by the Input Output Research (IOR) team, where a community of over 100 researchers, engineers, and contributors walked through the restructured Cardano Vision 2026: a human-centered, scalable, and post-quantum secure research proposal.
These R&D sessions are a recurring touchpoint where the work shaping Cardano's long-term future is opened up for scrutiny and feedback, setting out the science that will keep Cardano competitive and secure for the cycles ahead. This session served as a 2026 roadmap: a single, interconnected program brainstormed to bridge research domains, from cryptography and consensus to identity, governance, and interoperability.
A restructured research program
The session began with the numbers behind the proposal. Over the previous year, the program delivered a 20% increase in outputs, 24 published papers, and eight technology validation outputs – all while reducing its budget by 40% in US dollar terms. For the research team, that efficiency is the point: bear markets are when the foundations for future cycles get built, and rigorous research remains the most reliable way to develop infrastructure that stays competitive.
To sharpen focus, the program has been reorganized into 15 market-oriented initiatives grouped under six technical work packages: Trust and Security; Scalability and Execution; Developer Experience; Applications; Economics and Incentives; and Governance and Identity. These map to three strategic priorities – human-centered development that improves the developer experience and rewards stake pool operators (SPOs), a layered approach to scalability across layer 1 and layer 2, and post-quantum preparedness.
Underpinning the work is an evidence-based innovation funnel. Research moves through stage-gated, go/no-go decisions, progressing from early-stage science to technology validation – prototyping and simulation – and finally to engineering implementation. The proposal draws on a nine-organization consortium led by IOR, with 36 full-time equivalents and embedded researchers at universities including Edinburgh, Tokyo, Oxford, UC Berkeley, Sydney, and Buenos Aires. The 2026 cycle targets a substantial body of deliverables: five Cardano Improvement Proposals (CIPs) at technology readiness level five, 12 prototypes, eight problem statements, and a portfolio of peer-reviewed papers.
Addressing community questions about whether exploratory research pays off, the team pointed to a historic conversion rate of more than 20% – about 50 of 250 papers reaching implementation – and contrasted it with the sub-1% success rate typical of venture-backed startups. Foundational research, they argued, prevents engineering gaps from appearing later, and the interconnected nature of these streams is precisely why splitting them risks duplicated effort and diluted accountability.
Preparing Cardano for the quantum era
Varun Maram, research lead in post-quantum security at IOR, introduced one of the program's most consequential long-term bets: post-quantum cryptography (PQC). Today's protocols lean on elliptic-curve cryptography, which a sufficiently large quantum computer could break – a vulnerability first described by Peter Shor in 1994. With recent results from Google Quantum AI and academic groups accelerating progress in the field, the team is treating the threat as a question of when, not if.
Rather than retrofitting fixes, the PQC initiative takes a bottom-up approach, building quantum-secure replacements for Cardano's core primitives – including the signatures and key-evolving signatures that protect proof-of-stake security. The roadmap runs from assessing state-of-the-art PQC building blocks (D1.1) and designing a novel post-quantum verifiable random function (VRF) to replace the one currently used to elect slot leaders (D1.2), through an end-to-end security proof for an improved Ouroboros protocol (D2.1) and a prototype (D2.2), to a published migration strategy in the form of a SIP (D3.1). The team is also weighing migration paths such as updating user wallet addresses with the help of zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs.
Crucially, PQC is not a siloed effort. It threads through node security via hardware security modules, network performance as computational overhead grows, and cross-chain coordination through threshold signatures. The goal is both ambitious and specific: to make Cardano the first mainstream proof-of-stake blockchain with a formally grounded, evidence-based post-quantum migration strategy – a property with real weight for enterprise and government adoption.
Scaling the base layer: Linear Leios and Peras
Matthias Fitzi, senior research fellow at IOR, turned to throughput, starting with Linear Leios, where the core idea is to decouple the dissemination of large endorsement blocks from the consensus layer over smaller ranking blocks. SPOs vote on the availability and validity of endorsement blocks; once enough votes are gathered, those blocks are referenced in the next ranking block, so the system can keep moving without waiting for every block to fully propagate.
The hard part is parameterization. The team is studying how choices such as endorsement block size – anywhere from a few megabytes to a gigabyte – interact with the constraints of lower-end SPOs, and what they imply for maximal extractable value (MEV) and front-running under the new protocol. Formal safety proofs run alongside this analysis to ensure Leios is sound enough to serve as a backbone for Cardano.
Fitzi also described Peras, which targets faster block settlement and shares much of Leios's design language: SPO voting, optimistic fast paths, and graceful fallback to Ouroboros guarantees if participation drops or an adversary grows too strong. A key research thread is merging Leios and Peras to eliminate redundant voting, and refining the Peras cooldown mechanism so the protocol runs more efficiently when conditions are benign. Giorgos Panagiotakos, research lead at IOR, added that this preparatory work is already feeding into engineering decisions – parameter selection being a top priority among them – and is designed to make the protocol cheaper for SPOs to run through optimizations like combined voting, which cuts both bandwidth and CPU usage.
Foundational research: sharding and identity
Not every research item is destined for implementation, and Fitzi was candid about sharding. Dividing work across smaller groups of SPOs could scale capacity by the number of shards, but it also risks over-centralization and added complexity – and competitors such as Ethereum and Polkadot are already progressing in this area. With a deliberately minimal 0.5 FTE allocated, the 2026 objective is not to build sharding itself, but to gather enough evidence to decide whether Cardano needs it at all, or whether Leios and Hydra already provide sufficient headroom.
On identity, Jesús Díaz Vico, research fellow at IOR, explained why most Web2 identity protocols sit awkwardly in decentralized ecosystems: they assume rigid, vertical trust authorities. The team has selected a UC Berkeley proposal, ‘Global proof of personhood and relationship credentials’, that explores a horizontal alternative in which users make verifiable statements about one another. The aim is to lay the groundwork for native Cardano identities that smart contracts can consume, and for objective, on-chain ways to measure trust.
Zero-knowledge verification and developer experience
Díaz Vico also walked through Cardano's zero-knowledge (ZK) agenda – succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge, or SNARKs. A practical friction point today is curve support: Cardano favors BLS12-381 for its security properties, while much of the external ZK tooling is built around BN254. To close that gap, the team is developing a generic wrapper that lets proofs generated in formats like Groth16 over BN254 be verified on Cardano, smoothing the path for developers bringing existing circuits to the chain.
Beyond the wrapper, new tooling includes a cost estimator that lets developers gauge the computational cost of a ZK circuit before committing to building it. The team is also assessing support for Plonky3 and STARKs – which would let Cardano tap proving stacks like RISC Zero and SP1 while strengthening post-quantum properties – and researching recursion and lattice-based folding to enable more efficient, multi-step proofs. Responding to a question about scope, the team were clear that this work is core Cardano infrastructure, not exclusive to Midnight: efficient on-chain proof verification is exactly the feature on which a Cardano–Bitcoin bridge depends.
Bridges, agent chains, and governance
Pooya Farshim, a research fellow at IOR, outlined the approach to bridges, in which the team is building a foundational framework to connect Cardano with Bitcoin, Midnight, and other chains. Because bridges are so often the weakest link in an ecosystem, the work leans on formal methods to deliver adaptive security, with a particular focus on Bitcoin liquidity and agent chain development. As the team noted, understanding these connections in depth is what allows Cardano to avoid relying on third-party security assumptions.
Paolo Penna, a research fellow at IOR, closed the technical agenda with governance, split into two connected strands. The first strand develops optimal voting schemes that handle Cardano's roughly 30 system parameters while mitigating declining participation. The second strand builds a language to specify and formally verify that voting systems behave as intended – work that should also serve external decentralized autonomous organizations building on Cardano.
A research-first path to adoption
When a community member asked whether Cardano could keep pace with Ethereum in terms of scalability and complexity, the team framed the answer as a deliberate strategic shift: from core infrastructure toward utility and developer experience, with treasury allocations increasingly favoring utility-oriented proposals. The team stressed that security remains the foundation – the property that matters most for the institutional and government adoption Cardano is building toward.
That is the throughline of Cardano Vision 2026. Post-quantum readiness, formally proven consensus, trust-minimized bridges, and verifiable governance are not separate projects so much as facets of a single commitment: to build systems that endure. If 2025 demonstrated what Cardano's research engine can produce, 2026 is about making sure the chain is ready for the threats – and the opportunities – of the decade ahead.
If you missed the event – or would like to revisit the discussion – you can now watch the recording.
Cardano R&D sessions bring together researchers, engineers, and ecosystem contributors to explore the technologies shaping Cardano's long-term future. The Cardano Vision 2026 proposal remains open for community feedback through its call for partners.
Timelines and product features are not final and are not guaranteed; all future developments are subject to change.
