The Cardano R&D Sessions, hosted by Input | Output Research (IOR) in collaboration with the Intersect Research Working Group (IRWG), bring the community together each month for research-led discussions with guest speakers from across the ecosystem.
Held on the first Tuesday of each month, the sessions provide a forum for strategic collaboration—helping to connect cutting-edge research with real-world development.
This Cardano Forum thread includes the full session recording, while other posts offer detailed write-ups of the discussions. If you have questions, feedback, or would like to present at a future session, please visit the IRWG knowledge base or reach out to IOR directly.
In the inaugural Cardano R&D Session, hosted by Input | Output Research (IOR) in association with the Intersect Research Working Group, we hear from from Sandro Coretti-Drayton, Research Fellow, IOR, Philip DiSarro, CEO of Anastasia Labs, Vladimir Sinyakov, Founder and CTO of zkFold SA, and Caro Lang, Dev Lead at Eryx.
Sandro Coretti-Drayton of IOR introduces the four research threads that build on the Hydra Head:
Hydra Tail (zk-rollups)
Hydra Interhead (multi-party state channels)
Optimization tools
Auditing tools
The panelists share their recently funded Cardano treasury proposals including optimistic rollups, ZK bridges, ZK rollups, Hydra-inspired designs & more—showing how Cardano’s EUTXO model enables diverse scaling paths.
In the July Cardano R&D Session, hosted by Input | Output Research in association with the Intersect Research Working Group, we hear from Paolo Penna, Research Fellow at Input | Output Research; Manvir Schneider, Senior Research Scientist at Cardano Foundation; Ryan Wiley, Cerkoryn & DRep,;and Raul Antonio, CTO of Fluid Tokens
Paolo Penna presents a foundational model of how proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains function economically and introduces the three research streams within the Cardano Vision research program:
Tokenomics Design – studying how treasury flows, reserves, and token supply impact ecosystem health
Rewards Sharing & Transaction Fees – refining incentive schemes for validators and governance
Stablecoins – developing risk-aware frameworks for decentralized stablecoin design
Ryan Wiley (Cerkoryn) revisits CIP-50, proposing a penalty for underpledged stake pools to improve decentralization and raise the Nakamoto coefficient.
The roundtable explored how tokenomics can drive sustainable growth, decentralization, and long-term resilience, addressing key challenges from pledge mechanics and validator incentives to stablecoin design and self-sustaining rewards.
Panelists shared a bold vision for Cardano’s future: a network powered by transaction fee sustainability, interoperable token economies, and DApps that integrate seamlessly with DeFi, governance, and Hydra.
Cardano Technology Validation | August '25 Cardano R&D Session
In the August Cardano R&D Session, Fergie Miller, Director of Research Partnerships at Input Output, introduces us to David Rosales, Head of R&D Innovation; and team members including Raphael Toledo, Dominik Zukowski, Dmytro Kaidalov, Alex Slesarenko, and Nicolas Henin.
Fergie Miller provides an overview of the Cardano Vision Proposal, a five-year roadmap to 2030 spanning nine focus areas like Ouroboros, smart contracts, tokenomics, and zero-knowledge proofs, with 2025 priorities and strong community backing via a 67%+ Treasury withdrawal vote.
David Rosales introduces the evidence-based methodology for technology validation, emphasizing de-risking through formal methods, simulations, and community-aligned workstreams. The session features deep dives into key innovation projects:
Raphael Toledo on Ouroboros Phalanx for anti-grinding security
Dominik Zukowski on Jolteon Liveness for partner chains consensus
Dmytro Kaidalov on RSnarks (Halo2 SNARKs) for on-chain ZK proofs
Alex Slesarenko on Proof of Restake (Minotaur) for secure PoS launches
Nicolas Henin on Cavefish for light client transaction building
Dmytro Kaidalov proposing Committee Proofs for trustless cross-chain bridges.
The presentations highlight prototypes, CIPs, formal proofs, and community feedback opportunities, underscoring Cardano’s commitment to secure, scalable innovation.
In the September Cardano R&D Session, hosted by Input | Output Research in association with the Intersect Research Working Group, the focus turned to Cardano’s Ouroboros protocol and its evolution toward greater performance, resilience, and sustainability.
Chief Scientist Aggelos Kiayias presented the vision for Ouroboros Omega, described as the ‘final form’ of Cardano’s protocol. He introduced two guiding principles shaping its future:
• Optimistic multi-path execution – accelerating to near centralized-like performance when conditions allow, while always falling back to a secure baseline when needed.
• Multi-resource security – moving beyond stake to include useful work and reputation signals, broadening participation and strengthening resilience.
The session also marked a major milestone for Ouroboros Leios, with William Wolff, Giorgos Panagiotakos, and Brian Bush from the Leios innovation team presenting its handover to engineering.
Leios addresses capacity, capability, and sustainability challenges by splitting blocks into ranking and endorsement parts, enabling higher throughput while preserving security. Extensive simulations demonstrate competitive transaction inclusion times, significant Plutus scaling potential, and robust performance even under adverse conditions.
In the October Interchains Cardano R&D Session, Fergie Miller, Director of Research Partnerships at Input Output, convenes a panel of ecosystem leaders and researchers including Jesús Díaz Vico, Paolo Penna, Karmel Elshinnawi, and Mauricio Magaldi to explore Cardano’s interoperability strategy.
Fergie Miller opens with an overview of the Cardano Vision research programme, a five-year agenda spanning 34 research streams across nine thematic areas, including Interchains. He highlights the shift from isolated blockchains toward an interconnected “internet of blockchains,” where liquidity, identity, and computation can move seamlessly across systems—while emphasising the critical need for security given the historical fragility of cross-chain bridges.
The session presents deep dives into key interchain research and innovation areas:
Jesús Díaz Vico introduces Cardinal, a trust-minimised Bitcoin–Cardano bridge enabling secure use of Bitcoin liquidity within Cardano’s DeFi ecosystem, with strong guarantees even under adversarial conditions.
Paolo Penna explores interoperability economics through Airdrop Games, framing token distribution as a mechanism for bootstrapping adoption and aligning incentives across interconnected systems.
Karmel Elshinnawi outlines the partner chains framework, enabling purpose-built chains to interoperate natively with Cardano while inheriting its security and liquidity.
Mauricio Magaldi presents Midnight’s cross-chain privacy model, positioning privacy as a shared primitive delivered through interoperability, supported by intent-based protocols and emerging chain abstraction concepts.
The discussion also covers broader research streams underpinning Interchains, including trustless state proofs and bridges, light client infrastructure, cross-chain DApps and oracles, and next-generation consensus models designed for multi-chain environments.
The session highlights how formal methods, cryptographic guarantees, and incentive design combine to enable secure and scalable interoperability. It underscores Cardano’s transition from a single-network paradigm to a multi-chain ecosystem, where sovereign systems can interoperate without compromising decentralization or security.
For the sixth instalment of the Cardano R&D Sessions in 2025, Input | Output Research (IOR) went on the road and co-hosted an SPO-led X Space organized by community manager Matthew Capps. Following introductions, Director of Research Partnerships, Fergie Miller, outlined how IOR’s five-year research program, Cardano Vision, delivers direct, long-term value to SPOs.
Strengthening the security foundations on which their operations depend. Research streams such as Post-Quantum Landscape and Byzantine-Resilient Networking prepare the network for emerging adversarial models, ensuring that stake keys, slot leader election processes, and node communication remain secure even under quantum-capable adversaries. Additional work on location-aware deployment further enhances network resilience, reducing regional failure risk and improving reliability for operators and delegators.
Scalability initiatives expand SPO capabilities beyond traditional block production. Technologies such as Ouroboros Leios, decentralized storage, sharding, and Minotaur’s multi-resource consensus create new participation paths and potential revenue streams. These developments reduce operational overhead, increase transaction capacity, and enable operators to specialize or serve multiple ecosystems without duplicating infrastructure, positioning SPOs as critical service providers in a more modular and interoperable network.
Economic and tokenomic research supports sustainable operator business models by reducing reward volatility and enabling predictable income structures. Improvements in reward sharing, congestion control, and fee markets provide clearer incentives aligned to real network usage, while partner chain economics and restaking frameworks allow SPOs to capture value across multiple execution environments. Together, these initiatives evolve SPOs from passive network maintainers into active economic participants benefiting from increased activity and demand.
Governance enhancements ensure SPOs retain meaningful influence over Cardano’s direction. Lightweight voting protocols, identity-anchored participation mechanisms, and analytical tooling make governance more efficient, accountable, and evidence-based. By lowering the cost of participation and increasing the quality of decision-making inputs, Cardano Vision positions SPOs not only as infrastructure operators but as core stewards of the network’s technical, economic, and policy evolution.
This thread is a goldmine! It’s often hard to track down these specific R&D sessions across different platforms. Thank you for keeping this updated, it makes diving into the technical nuances of the protocol so much more accessible for the community.
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.
Cardano’s long-term advantage is built on rigorous research rather than reacting to short-term trends. By combining peer-reviewed science, formal methods, and engineering, the network aims to solve fundamental problems before they become bottlenecks, creating infrastructure that is secure, scalable, and resilient for decades rather than years.
From research to implementation
Cardano Vision 2026 builds on a structured innovation pipeline that moves ideas from fundamental research, through technology validation, into implementation-ready specifications and prototypes. This approach is designed to reduce risk while ensuring that research produces practical outcomes developers and the ecosystem can adopt.
Human-centred design
The programme focuses on making Cardano easier to build on and easier to use. Priorities include improving the developer experience, simplifying user interactions, enhancing governance participation, and creating better economic incentives so that advanced blockchain technology becomes more accessible to both builders and everyday users.
Scalability
Scalability is addressed as a complete system rather than a single upgrade. Research spans consensus improvements such as Leios and Peras, execution-layer optimisation, Layer-2 technologies, data availability, succinct proofs, networking, and longer-term work such as sharding, allowing multiple complementary approaches to increase throughput without compromising decentralisation.
Post-quantum security
Rather than waiting for quantum computers to become an immediate threat, Cardano is investing now in quantum-resistant cryptography, consensus, signatures, and migration strategies. The objective is crypto-agility: enabling the network to transition safely to post-quantum security with minimal disruption when required.
Collaboration and delivery
The programme is delivered through collaboration between Input Output Research, engineering teams, universities, and ecosystem partners. By combining academic expertise with implementation teams and open collaboration, Cardano aims to turn high-assurance research into deployable capabilities that benefit the wider ecosystem.
