Welcome to the Cardano Community Digest!
Published by the Cardano Foundation Community Team every two weeks, this Digest will provide you with news, updates and events about the project and ecosystem!
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In this edition of the Community Digest, we highlight:
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Cardano and Injective Connected via IBC on Testnet: Cardano’s first live on-chain IBC rail is live on testnet, enabling native ADA-to-Injective and INJ-to-Cardano transfers without centralized bridges.
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Constitutional Committee Election Concludes: Audited results confirmed Philip DiSarro, Leandros BSP, Marek Mahut, and Cardano Curia as the elected candidates, with the governance action to appoint them submitted on-chain.
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Musashi Dojo Prepares for Water Phase: The public Leios testnet moves from network deployment to parameter and load testing, with a proposed SPO incentive program awaiting final approval.
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Cardano Foundation Updates: The Foundation announced its Reef Data eG partnership for verifiable on-chain financial reporting, joined the Energy Tokenization Sandbox, and launched a new “Governance Applied” Academy course.
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CIP Updates: Improvements to Plutus and its Ledger interface, ongoing deep review of DRep and “Handle” proposals of community interest, and completion of CIP-0186 on improving mobile wallet UX.
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Community Newsletters: Cardanians covers new AI developer skills for Claude and Codex, six years of staking, and SundaeSwap v4 plans, while the Weekly Cardano Digest leads with the developer skills launch and TxPipe’s Dolos v1.6.0.
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Intersect MBO Updates: Intersect covered the enacted van Rossem hard fork, the concluded Constitutional Committee election, and the Constitutional Amendment Portal alpha across its latest weekly updates.
All this and more in today’s Digest.
Cardano and Injective Connected via IBC Protocol on Testnet
The Cardano Foundation announced on August 3 that Cardano and the Injective blockchain are now connected via the Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) Protocol on testnet, the first live on-chain IBC rail ever established to Cardano. The connection enables native ADA-to-Injective and INJ-to-Cardano transfers directly between the two chains without centralised bridges, using the same open standard that underpins communication across the Cosmos ecosystem. A step-by-step guide for developers to test the testnet transfer is available at the Cardano IBC Incubator on GitHub.
IBC represents one of the most battle-tested interoperability standards in blockchain, having facilitated trillions of dollars in cross-chain transfers across Cosmos chains and beyond. Its arrival on Cardano testnet is the result of sustained engineering work inside the Cardano Foundation’s open-source incubator project.
When deployed to mainnet, it would allow Cardano-based applications to communicate natively with IBC-compatible chains without relying on custodial intermediaries, quite a meaningful expansion of Cardano’s composability surface area.
The Foundation will host a dedicated Developer Office Hours session with Fabian Bormann, CF Team Lead and Senior Ecosystem Engineer, on Friday August 7 to walk through the integration and answer technical questions. The testnet guide is open to all developers.
Cardano DevX Initiative Calls on Tooling Developers - Map and Pledge Open for Contributions
Robertino Martinez, DevX Lead at Input Output, has issued a call to all Cardano tooling developers to map the ecosystem and commit to closer collaboration. The Developer Tooling Map already lists 255 resources across categories from smart contracts and SDKs to node operations and governance, and developers whose work is missing are invited to submit it so nothing gets left out of the integration effort.
Alongside the map, the Cardano Tooling Collaboration Pledge sets out simple, non-binding open source principles: build on what exists, interoperate by default, and share what we learn. Early signatories include Mesh SDK, TxPipe, Tapdano, No.Witness Labs, GameChanger Finance, and teams across Input Output.
Call to action: If you build tooling on Cardano, check the tooling map, add your projects, and sign the pledge to help build the developer experience Cardano deserves.
Constitutional Committee Election - Four Candidates Confirmed
On July 30, 2026, Intersect announced that the audited results of the 2026 Constitutional Committee election are in, with DReps having selected their four preferred candidates to move forward to the on-chain action updating Cardano’s Constitutional Committee: Philip DiSarro (~2.0 billion ada, 24 votes), Leandros BSP (~2.0 billion ada, 23 votes), Marek Mahut (~1.4 billion ada, 28 votes), and Cardano Curia (~1.3 billion ada, 27 votes). A total of 38 DReps participated in the election, casting a combined 2.332 billion ada in voting power, after voting closed on July 23 at 21:45 UTC.
The full results and audit are available on the Intersect Knowledge Base, and the raw data can be audited independently on Cexplorer. The Constitutional Committee is one of Cardano’s three constitutional governance bodies alongside DReps and SPOs, determining whether governance actions comply with the Cardano Constitution. The on-chain update action now proceeds through Cardano’s governance process; if ratified, the newly elected members will replace the committee members whose terms expire in September, ensuring continuity of constitutional oversight.
Musashi Dojo Launches - The Leios Public Testnet
On June 23, 2026, Input Output launched Musashi Dojo, the public testnet for Ouroboros Leios, describing it as a collective effort alongside the Cardano Foundation, Intersect, and Blink Labs. Named after Miyamoto Musashi, with phases following The Book of Five Rings, the testnet lets SPOs deploy Leios-enabled block producers and builders test dApps, wallets, and infrastructure ahead of mainnet. Leios adds Endorser Blocks alongside Praos Ranking Blocks, targeting up to 30 to 65x throughput (1,500+ TPS under realistic conditions) without replacing the existing consensus layer.
With the initial Earth phase complete, Input Output is preparing the Water phase to test timing parameters, Endorser Block sizes, mempool behavior, and sustained network load, with results intended to set the initial Leios parameters for mainnet. A proposed SPO incentive program has received preliminary approval and awaits final sign-off. Watch the launch announcement here.
Cardano Improvement Proposals (CIP) Updates
Once again, Robert Phair brings us a snapshot of the Cardano Improvement Proposal (CIP) process, the mechanism by which any stakeholder can propose changes to the protocol. Proposals may be technical in nature, covering things like address formats or transaction metadata, or conceptual, framed as a Cardano Problem Statement (CPS) that names an issue before a solution is defined. Once submitted, proposals enter open review, gathering feedback from across the ecosystem before either advancing toward adoption or settling in as reference material.
Below is an update on the newly submitted proposals, proposals currently in review, and ones that have recently been completed.
New Proposals
Two proposals for significant improvement to Plutus and its interface to the Cardano Ledger:
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CIP-0194 candidate: Builtin pattern matching in UPLC - introduces a new Match AST node for pattern matching on complex, nested builtin values like Data (including the script context), without builtin invocation overhead. A working prototype already exists in the Plutus repo.
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CIP-0195 candidate: Data Encoding of Plutus V4 Ledger Types - specifies a simpler, more efficient encoding of Plutus V4 ledger API types as Data, leveraging new UPLC primitives and lessons learned from Plutus V1-V3.
Active Review
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CPS-0033 candidate: DRep Voting Power Concentration - continuation of the final review round with community governance advocates.
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(unconfirmed) Handle Provider Registry & Resolver - the technical solution to CPS-0032 (Handle Provider Interoperability): a provider registry modeled on CIP-0010, a standard resolver API, wallet display and collision-handling rules, plus on-chain resolution and security requirements.
Completed
Cardanians: Weekly Ecosystem Updates
On August 3, 2026, Cardanians released its latest Ecosystem Newsletter (#134), highlighting Cardano developer skills now being available for Claude, Codex, and other AI coding agents, giving them up-to-date Cardano documentation, tooling, and workflows instead of outdated training data. The newsletter also marked six years of Cardano staking since Shelley introduced stake pools and non-custodial delegation, covered SundaeSwap’s Sundae v4 plans with smart routing, concentrated liquidity, multi-asset pools, custom vaults, and partial fills, and noted that Cardano’s stablecoin marketcap has grown 94% over the past year to $55.7M, with USDCx holding the dominant share. Midnight has reached 120,000 mainnet transactions since its March launch, and Token Terminal ranks Cardano first by all-time core code commits, with nearly 500,000 commits across its public repositories.
Charles Hoskinson also said “Cardano deserves to succeed,” expressing frustration with
hacks, weak branding and marketing, and lagging adoption. For this and more, view the X thread.
Cardano Newsletter: Weekly Cardano Digest #135
On August 3, 2026, Issue #137 of the Weekly Cardano Digest leads with the Cardano Foundation’s launch of developer skills for AI coding agents, marking the first time tools like Claude and Codex can load current Cardano documentation directly instead of relying on potentially outdated training data, a meaningful fix for a real onboarding barrier for builders using AI-assisted development.
Lucas also covers Sundae Labs’ announcement of SundaeSwap v4, the next major upgrade to Cardano’s flagship DEX, bringing on-chain smart routing, concentrated liquidity, multi-asset pools, and partial fills, a substantial step up for the ecosystem’s trading infrastructure.
This edition also covered TxPipe’s Dolos v1.6.0 release, a release that ties the lightweight data node back into the broader governance infrastructure story. For this and more, read the full issue.
Spotlight on Cardano Content Creators
This week, we’re shining a light on some of Cardano’s community-driven content creators and ecosystem contributors. Across interviews, educational sessions, technical deep dives, and community discussions, these individuals and teams continue to help make Cardano more accessible, informative, and engaging for builders and community members alike. Here are a few recent highlights from across the ecosystem:
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Learn Cardano published a news update walking through AlphaGrowth’s on-chain Cardano PRIME proposal, a 120 million ada request to grow Cardano DeFi, alongside the governance debate around the net change limit, Ethereum’s research into native UTXOs, RealFi’s testnet launch, SecondFi recovery guidance, and EMURGO stepping down from the Pentad: Watch it here
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Linda released two new videos. In “Banking the Unbanked,” she explores RealFi’s credit protocol and its potential to bring practical financial inclusion to Cardano: Watch it here. She also published “Major blockchains are now copying ideas Cardano had years ago,” arguing that Ethereum, XRP, and Sui are converging on concepts Cardano treated as foundational, from formal methods and the UTXO model to sustainable proof of stake: Watch it here
Community Learning & Developer Engagement
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CIP-113 KYC: From Standard to Implementation | Developers Office Hour - In this session, the discussion moves beyond the CIP-113 specification to how programmable token standards and KYC-style compliance logic can be implemented on-chain, and what that means for developers building regulated or permissioned assets on Cardano. The full episode can be viewed here.
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Zero-Knowledge on Cardano: The Journey to PTAU | Developers Office Hour - In this session, the conversation turns to the privacy frontier, walking through the powers-of-tau (PTAU) trusted setup that underpins zero-knowledge proofs and the work required to bring practical ZK tooling to the Cardano ecosystem. The full episode can be viewed here.
Updates from the Cardano Foundation
The Cardano Foundation has shared several updates this week, covering developer tooling, open standards membership, enterprise engagement, and ecosystem infrastructure.
The headline announcement came on July 28, when the Foundation revealed its partnership with Reef Data eG, a Hamburg-based data cooperative backed by Hamburger Volksbank eG, ARIC e.V., VALIO Hamburg GmbH & Co., and Disruptive Elements GmbH. The cooperative will use Reeve, the Foundation’s open-source reporting transparency platform, to record its payment flows transparently and auditably on the Cardano blockchain, giving cooperative members full transparency over their own data and earned rewards while providing independent auditors with cryptographically anchored, time-stamped access to the cooperative’s financial record. “Reeve was built on the conviction that financial flows should be verifiable by everyone and fully transparent, particularly for those they affect,” said Cleopatra Martins, Finance Product Lead at the Cardano Foundation, noting that members and external auditors can now verify financial flows independently rather than relying on the cooperative’s own records alone. Read the full announcement here.
And that’s not all. On July 25, the Foundation was accepted into the Energy Tokenization Sandbox run by Lava Network and Electric Blue in partnership with Todo Finance, with work scheduled to begin the following week. The sandbox will explore tokenized energy use cases, building on the Foundation’s ongoing work at the intersection of blockchain and energy markets. Read more here.
Also announced on July 23, the Foundation will be a Gold Partner at the Crypto Valley Summit in September, where CEO Frederik Gregaard will discuss why “digital trust is the new global currency” with the Swiss blockchain community. Read more here.
On the education front, Cardano Academy launched “Governance Applied” on July 30, a new course guiding learners from wallet setup to casting their first on-chain vote on testnet, with the goal of ensuring decentralized governance works effectively through informed participation. Take the course here.
Rounding things out, the Foundation hosted a three-day hands-on workshop in Recife, Brazil, with Inovacao CESAR, where educators, researchers, and partners including Blockforce and UNDP explored Cardano and showcased real-world builds. And in case you missed it, the Foundation recapped its Rare Evo presence in Las Vegas, where the booth hosted demos, governance discussions, Ledger raffles, and developer onboarding, describing it as “the place people came back to.” Workshop X post. Rare Evo X post.
Update from Intersect MBO
Intersect shared the enactment of the van Rossem hard fork in Intersect Weekly Update #121 (July 24), which confirmed that Cardano’s first hard fork through the full governance era was enacted at the Epoch 644 boundary on July 18 with 77.63% DRep support (60% threshold), 52.7% SPO support (51% threshold), and six Constitutional Committee approvals (five required). A roughly ten-minute gap preceded the first post-enactment block, which the engineering teams are monitoring, though the transition into Epoch 645 ran normally. With van Rossem complete, the Hard Fork Working Group is finalizing the scope of the first Dijkstra era hard fork, targeting Nested Transactions and Linear Leios on mainnet by the end of 2026 and intending to name the fork after Alexander Esgen, while acknowledging the existing Info action proposing von Bergen. Update #122 (July 31) also covered a new parameter update action, submitted on-chain, that would lower minPoolCost from 170 ada to 75 ada and complete a 25% increase to Plutus memory limits, requiring 67% DRep and 51% SPO approval.
Intersect also reported that the Constitutional Committee election has concluded, with 38 DReps casting a combined 2.332 billion ada in voting power. The audited results confirmed Philip DiSarro (1.979 billion ada, 84.86%), Leandros BSP (1.965 billion ada, 84.26%), Marek Mahut (1.370 billion ada, 58.75%), and Cardano Curia (1.289 billion ada, 55.26%) as the four elected candidates, and the governance action to appoint them has been submitted on-chain, replacing the CC members whose terms expire in September if ratified.
Beyond the election, Intersect opened the Constitutional Amendment Portal (CAP) for alpha testing at cap.intersectmbo.org, letting anyone with a CIP-30 wallet read the Constitution, propose amendments, and file Constitutional Issue Statements, following live demos at Rare Evo in Las Vegas. The Intersect 2026 core budget treasury withdrawal was ratified with 75.69% DRep support, while voting on the updated Intersect Bylaws closed on July 31 with 47 Individual Members participating and audited results due August 3. Delivery highlights included the completed zkFold Rollup wallet milestone and Eryx’s ZK bridge project.
Cardano Forum Top 9 Referred Topics
Topics that have received the most clicks from external sources. (last 10 Days)
- Cardano Has the Tech. So Why Is Everyone Else Winning Deals?
- The Hype Cycle is Over, Welcome to the Era of Utility. Why Cardano is Just Getting Started
- I´m Cristian Rojas, I´m building K’altik, a traceability platform where every step of the supply chain becomes a verifiable on-chain record
- Hello Cardano — Anzus from Gem Wallet
- Don’t Let Your ADA Sleep: Why Participation Matters
- Governance Hour #9 - Daedalus Wallet Maintenance and Improvements 2026-2027 (22 July)
- Cardano Projects Showcase || July’s Edition || W/ GameChanger Wallet
- IOR Cardano Vision Work Program 2026: Mid-Year report (Draft)
- Recover of Eternl wallet
Upcoming Community Events
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08-12 BlockchainRio: Join the Cardano ecosystem at BlockchainRio, one of the region’s most prominent blockchain gatherings. This event brings together developers, entrepreneurs, and policy makers to discuss the latest trends, decentralized technology, and the future of the Web3 landscape in Latin America. - More Details Here
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08-18 CIP Editors Meeting: CIP meetings, generally biweekly and open to the public, plus any events for standardization working groups. - More Details Here
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09-09 Crypto Expo Dubai: Crypto Expo Dubai brings together the fast-evolving world of institutional digital assets, blockchain, Web3, crypto markets, and financial innovation, connecting institutions, investors, exchanges, and industry leaders in one of the world’s most dynamic business hubs. - More Details Here
For more weekly events, visit Cardano Events
Many thanks and greetings from the Community Team!