IOG Working Hard on Enhancing Cardano and Its Ecosystem

In the latest development update from IOG, Essential Cardano announced a series of advancements in the Cardano ecosystem. The most notable is the Marlowe smart contracts platform launch on the Cardano mainnet.

Marlowe is designed to simplify creating, testing, and deploying secure smart contracts on the Cardano blockchain. It offers a suite of open-source tools that cater to developers of all skill levels, providing intuitive solutions for creating, utilizing, and monetizing smart contracts. The platform’s launch is a significant milestone for Cardano, marking its readiness to support complex decentralized applications (dApps) and compete with other smart contract platforms.

In addition to the mainnet launch, the Marlowe team has been working on several other aspects. They have been setting up and deploying Marlowe Playground, a tool for writing and testing Marlowe contracts. They have also been working on the GetContract query and marlowe-loader services. The team has automated an end-to-end test scenario for Playground, connected its frontend tests to continuous integration (CI), and added the contract for difference (CFD) to the examples suite.

Furthermore, the team has been proofreading the specifications and validating Marlowe contracts for valid addresses. This meticulous approach ensures that the contracts deployed on the platform are secure and function as intended.

The Plutus tools team, another integral part of the Cardano ecosystem, has been working on finalizing the Marconi EpochSDD and MintBurn indexer for the sidechains project. They have also been working on fixing the resuming logic of Marconi indexers and separating the mocked node from plutus-pab.

In addition to the Marlowe launch, the core technology teams have been working on the upcoming node v.8.1.0, which will introduce more Conway era support, epoch boundary optimizations, and new network packages, among other improvements. The ledger team has made progress on the Conway ledger era, designing and implementing new certificates, and refactoring some of the data structures to support DRep actions.

The Adrestia team worked on separating the balance TX library, enhancing the database layer, and closing out the multi-signature wallet delegation functionality. The team is also preparing MBO repositories and updating cardano-wallet to support node v.8.0.x.

The Hydra team held their monthly review meeting and drafted the May report to be published on the website. They also made progress on implementing the first end-to-end journey for external commits using ‘Option A’ for regular UTXOs, while still considering ‘Option B’.

The Mithril team released a new 2321.1 distribution that fully implements the mechanism developed to sign generic data. They completed the upgrade of the Cardano node in the Mithril networks to v.8.0.0, and the refactoring of the state machines of the signer and aggregator.

The Voltaire team continues the conversations on CIP-1694 to establish an initial Minimum Viable Governance (MVG) framework. This framework is crucial for the advancement of participatory governance within the Cardano ecosystem.

The Catalyst team presented an overview of the continuous testnet during this week’s town hall. Catalyst’s Lead Architect, walked through the details and roadmap, and demoed how the community can start to interact with the testnet.

The Education team focused on writing content for Mastering Cardano and organizing some contributions. They were also busy finalizing the content for the Cardano Days event in the University of Celaya and planning for other in-person training events over the next few months.

Per Essential Cardnao’s blog post, Cardano has successfully launched 129 projects, generated more than 8.36 million native tokens, and executed 8,491 Plutus scripts. Further testament to Cardano’s dynamism is the striking figure of 1,245 projects currently being actively developed on its platform. Moreover, the network has demonstrated its power and reliability, having processed 67.8 million transactions. This remarkable progress underscores Cardano’s vigorous growth and its potential to deliver game-changing developments in the field of cryptocurrency.

Featured Image Credit: Photo / illustration by “Traxer” via Unsplash

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