Cardano's treasury model is straightforward: funding produces verifiable results, or it goes back. In Q4 2025 and Q1 2026, IO progressed sixteen of eighteen treasury-funded commitments. Two (Acropolis and tiered pricing) were canceled, and their funding was returned to the treasury. Every milestone in this period is publicly trackable through the treasury milestone tracker.
Key deliverables include:
- Adoption arrived. USDCx launched on Cardano in 84 days, minting over 15 million in its first week. DeFi total value locked grew from $127M to $142M. LayerZero integration was announced at Consensus Hong Kong, connecting Cardano and Midnight to over 160 blockchains and more than $80B in cross-chain assets.
- The core stack got stronger. Two major node releases (10.5.4 and 10.6.2), the KES agent shipped at v.1.0, and UTXO HD reduced node memory use by up to 80%.
- Three scaling solutions reached working code. Mithril hit its first stable release. Hydra moved to production-ready, with three releases and live ecosystem integrations. Leios produced its first working prototype.
- Builders got new tools. Plutus performance improvements, Cardano High Assurance opened formal verification tooling to its first cohort of five companies, and a new static analysis tool (Plu-Stan) was delivered.
- Research stayed publicly accountable. Two papers at Financial Cryptography 2026, IO's chief scientist named an ACM Fellow, and Work Package 25 closed with all milestones complete.
Adoption is showing up
USDCx launched on Cardano in Q1, 84 days from announcement to live. In its first week, more than 15 million USDCx was minted, DeFi total value locked grew from $127M to $142M, and major protocols, including Minswap, Liqwid, and SundaeSwap, had live liquidity pools. The infrastructure ran without errors.
LayerZero's integration with Cardano and Midnight, announced at Consensus Hong Kong, gives the ecosystem direct access to over $80 billion in cross-chain assets across 160+ blockchains. CME Group launched Cardano futures in February. Coinbase added ada as collateral for on-chain loans. Ada is now accepted in 137 SPAR stores across Switzerland.
The core stack shipped and held under pressure
IO Engineering shipped two major node releases (10.5.4 and 10.6.2) and released the KES agent at v.1.0, separating cryptographic key management from the main node process and reducing the attack surface for the 3,000+ stake pools that depend on it. UTXO HD moved the UTXO set from memory to disk, reducing node memory use by up to 80%.
When the November mainnet incident occurred, the team worked alongside the wider technical community to resolve it. That's the part of the work that doesn't make a press release, but it's the part that matters most.
Three scaling solutions, all shipping
Mithril reached its first stable release with decentralized message queue support, moving the protocol closer to operating without any central coordinator. Hydra shipped versions 1.0.0 through 1.3.0 across the period and now has third-party implementations: Pondora's Echo (the first non-custodial Hydra implementation) and the VTech Hydra SDK. Leios produced its first working prototype, distributing endorser blocks across a multi-node test network – a tangible demonstration that the design works in practice – with ongoing progress shared in a dedicated tracker.
Research and tooling kept pace
IO Research closed Work Package 25 with all funding milestones complete and a public consultation that reached over 24,000 people. Two papers were published at Financial Cryptography 2026: one on incentivizing geographic diversity, one on restaking security. Professor Aggelos Kiayias was named an ACM Fellow, a distinction held by roughly the top 1% of the global computing community.
Cardano High Assurance opened its early access program to five companies testing automated formal verification at the UPLC level. Plutus shipped Van Rossem hard fork features, faster Flat decoding, and improved Plinth tooling. A new static analysis tool, Plu-Stan, was delivered for Plinth developers.
Q2 is already loaded:
- Protocol version 11 intra-era hard fork, coordinated by Intersect
- Node v.10.7 release
- Mithril 2608 distribution, advancing SNARK proof integration
- Leios public testnet, building on the Q1 prototype
- IOR Work Package 26 underway
- The Cryptographic Tools for the Blockchain workshop at Eurocrypt 2026 in May.
Read the report
The full Q4 2025 to Q1 2026 delivery report goes into greater depth on each of the items above: research papers, ledger evolution, Plutus optimizations, Hydra release notes, and the Leios prototype architecture.
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