At a glance
- Two Cardano engineering teams are moving from IO Labs to independent organizations: consensus to Serokell and developer experience (DevX) to AlwaysTrue.
- Every team goes to an organization that already builds on Cardano and knows the part of the system it is taking on.
- The two organizations spread responsibility for Cardano's core engineering across more independent teams.
- Engineers move with their work, so the code stays with the people who already know it.
- Each team moves on its own schedule between now and early 2027. The work continues throughout, coordinated in the open through Intersect.
Before Cardano's mainnet went live in 2017, engineers at a Haskell firm called Serokell worked with IOHK to turn a research paper into a running blockchain. Together they built the core of Cardano SL, the first Cardano node, and with it the first implementation of Ouroboros, the proof-of-stake protocol Cardano still runs on. Nine years on, the team that maintains Cardano's consensus layer is moving to Serokell.
It is one of two moves in this round of Cardano's engineering decentralization. Developer experience (DevX) moves to AlwaysTrue. The engineers move with their work, and each new home already builds on Cardano. Serokell has the longest history with the network. AlwaysTrue knows the systems its new team will maintain.
Consensus returns to Serokell
The consensus layer decides which chain is the real one. It runs Ouroboros, which determines which stake pool may produce the next block, and when two versions of the chain compete, it picks the one every honest node should follow. It also holds the hard fork combinator, the machinery that lets Cardano move from one era to the next without restarting the chain.
Serokell has been here before. Its Cardano SL work covered the protocol core, the network implementation, a command-line client, and an early block explorer built with IOHK engineers. The firm has stayed close to Haskell ever since. It funds a team that works full time on the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, which the Cardano node is built with, so the consensus engineers will sit alongside people who work on the compiler their own code depends on.
DevX moves to AlwaysTrue
Robertino Martinez led the Developer Experience initiative that Input Output (IO) proposed and DReps ratified this year, and he now continues that work at AlwaysTrue. DevX covers what gets a new builder from a first experiment to a mainnet launch: documentation, tools, libraries, worked examples, deployment, and everything in between.
The firm audits Cardano smart contracts and builds tooling, protocols, and products on top of Cardano. The team has worked on Cardano since 2021 and is the same one that executed IO's developer experience work from the get-go. Its cardano-init tool scaffolds a complete Cardano protocol repository in one command, with a working example ready to be deployed out of the box. Its ContractsLibrary project, due in November, is building Cardano's counterpart to OpenZeppelin: reusable contracts that each ship with off-chain builders, a written specification, and Lean 4 proofs. Its work on documentation, bounties, and open-source contributions improves the ecosystem's overall quality.
The people helping a new developer write a first validator also review validators for a living.
What stays put
The code stays in its public repositories. Consensus remains in the IntersectMBO organization on GitHub, while the developer tools AlwaysTrue maintains remain open source under the Apache 2.0 license. People move on different dates, starting this month and continuing into early 2027. The work carries on during each move, with planning coordinated publicly through Intersect.
These two moves continue the decentralization of Cardano's core engineering. They follow transfers already announced this year: Mithril to Teragone, Daedalus to Se7en Labs, the ledger, blockchain indexer, formal methods and high-availability engineering to BlockPQR, and Plutus to Midgard Labs. ICAN Group also took on platform engineering, quality assurance, cryptography, and performance and tracing.
To see how Cardano's engineering is organized across IO Labs and its partners, and what ships next, visit IO Labs.
