Dear Cardano community,
Input Output Research (IOR) is pleased to submit the draft of the IOR Cardano Vision and Work Program 2025 End-year report for Fundamental Research to Intersect this December. Cardano Vision launched in January 2025 with Work Program 2025 (WP25) – a five-year initiative grounded in peer-reviewed science designed to secure Cardano’s long-term leadership in scalability, sustainability, and security. This report provides a comprehensive overview of the progress, milestones, and priorities delivered during the program’s first year.
Fundamental Research focuses on formalizing ideas and proofs, operating primarily at software readiness levels (SRL) 1-2, with an expected market impact in 3-5 years. Applied evidence-based methodology helps move from problem statements through formal models, rigorous proofs, and eventually executable artifacts, aligning theory with real-world implementation.
In 2025, IOR advanced 20 foundational research streams that reinforce Cardano’s leadership in blockchain science. We are proud to report that we published 24 papers during WP25, exceeding our contractual target of 20 research outputs.
Key achievements in fundamental research for 2025 include:
- Ouroboros Omega (OO): major progress was made with OO-1V Peras, proving safety, liveness, and self-healing for fast settlement, and OO-2 Leios, delivering a Crypto ’25 paper demonstrating throughput scalability. We also advanced OO-3 Fair transaction processing with a paper on adaptive security for fair transaction ordering accepted at Asiacrypt ‘25.
- Decentralized storage (WOS-4): research delivered a formal treatment of adaptively secure decentralized storage networks (DSNs) and explored Byzantine-resilient primitives for distributed hash tables (DHTs).
- Tokenomicon (TO): work advanced new economic models for Cardano, extending earlier work to cover reserve policies and resilience. This included introducing a Shapley-value-based pooling scheme as an alternative to proportional sharing and disseminating it at major conferences.
- Interchains (IC): we delivered the first formal bridge security framework (Bridge Games), and introduced Cavefish – an ultra-efficient light client protocol for UTXO chains.
- Core zero-knowledge (ZK): advances included the AGATE framework for formalizing trusted execution environments (TEEs) and UC-SNARKs with transparent setup, positioning Cardano at the forefront of ZK research.
The Cardano community’s continued trust and support are essential to the success of this science-led research.
The IOR team now invites you to review the full draft report and share your feedback on the Cardano Forum. Your insights are crucial for refining our work and planning future priorities.
Review period: January 2026 (until January 23)
Draft report link: IOR - Cardano Vision & Work Program 2025 - End-Year Report - Fundamental Research (Draft) - Google Docs
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Thank you for this comprehensive report. As a GTM agency working with Web3 founders, a few observations from the commercial adoption side.
What resonates strongly:
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Tokenomics research - The work on tokenomics, airdrop games, and behavioral economics is exactly what founders need. The finding that crypto holders differ from traditional investors validates what we see in the field: enterprise GTM for Web3 requires different playbooks than Web2.
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Congestion control - Predictable fees and service guarantees are prerequisites for enterprises. The tiered pricing and “blockchain space derivatives” work addresses a real barrier to adoption - enterprises need cost predictability for budgeting and procurement. This could be translated beautifully for enterprise messaging.
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Interchains - Bridge sec (incl. light client infra) directly enables enterprise use cases. Some of the examples are very promising for resource-constrained enterprise environments.
Where we see opportunity for future expansion:
As Fergie mentioned in today’s GMC call, future research programs could include research for - or involvement with - external communications and go-to-market strategy. Building on that:
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Research → Founder translation - It would be incredibly valuable to translate this research to founders and make it relevant to them - tokenomics insights, GTM implications (such as the airdrop games findings), best practices for partner chain launches. Not saying IOR has to do this, but it could be Intersect work, or something we’d be happy to support.
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Enterprise adoption metrics - The report tracks academic outputs well. Future reports could also track commercial impact: enterprise pilots using research outputs, time from research to production, builder adoption of best practices.
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Geographic diversity for BD - The incentive mechanism for SPO distribution is interesting. Similar thinking applied to enterprise BD could strengthen Cardano’s pipeline beyond crypto-native regions.
A question:
How is IOR envisioning this research being taken further? Specifically, how will implications for adoption - such as by enterprises - be derived? We’d be curious to hear what the pathway looks like from published paper to practical guidance for builders.
Lastly, a shameless plug:
We’ve submitted 2 small Fund 15 proposals in the ecosystem category focused on exactly this gap between GTM research and commercial execution. Voting opened today - would be amazing to get upvotes or comments!
Best,
Natalie & Jashar
So So Scaled!
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Hi Natalie & Jashar,
Thank you for your positive feedback and observations. It is great to hear that the work is resonating with you and very encouraging to hear that the commercial side of the ecosystem is aligned so well with our research focus.
Bridging the gap between research and GTM is very important, as you have noted. Our vision is structured around SLRs, specifically designed to move beyond theoretical papers and into implementation, where prototypes, simulations, and proofs of concepts are produced. We agree that translating this work into marketing, documentation, and GTM strategy assets is crucial and a good opportunity for collaboration with partners in the ecosystems.
We are looking to continue to develop community dissemination through channels like CDEC, Cardano R&D Sessions, SPO collaborations and the DRep newsletter, amongst others.
Wishing you all the best with your Fund 12 proposals.
Niamh
IOR Communications & Partnerships
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