Inputs and Outputs said it made progress on 16 of Cardano’s 18 Treasury-funded commitments during the fourth quarter of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026, making the period a test of whether ecosystem financing can translate into publicly verifiable delivery. Two commitments, Acropolis and Tiered Pricing, have been cancelled, with funding returned to the Treasury, according to IO’s delivery report.
The report puts the Cardano treasury model in unusually straightforward terms: the fund either produces traceable outputs, or it returns. “In the fourth quarter of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026, IO made significant progress across 18 Treasury-funded commitments. Sixteen commitments were successfully progressed. Two – Acropolis and Tiered Pricing – were canceled and refinanced. Every finding in this report is publicly verifiable.”
Cardano adoption is moving from roadmap to usage
The most compelling adoption mentor was… Launch USDCx on Cardano in the first quarter of 2026. IO said the asset went live 84 days after the announcement, with more than 15 million USDCx minted in the first week. During that period, the total value of Cardano DeFi locked rose from $127 million to $142 million, while Minswap, Liqwid, and SundaeSwap supported live liquidity pools.
Interoperability was the second major theme of adoption. Announced LayerZero integration With Cardano and Midnight the ecosystem connects to more than 160 blockchains and more than $80 billion in Omnichain assets, according to the report. IO described it as “the largest interoperability launch in the history of the ecosystem,” with particular importance to Midnight’s selective exposure and zero-knowledge proof architecture.
The report also noted several external milestones around the Cardano ecosystem, including CME Pool’s launch of Cardano futures in February, Coinbase’s addition of ada as collateral for on-chain loans, the launch of Midnight’s mainnet, and acceptance of ada at 137 SPAR stores in Switzerland.
IO’s architecture modernization focuses on node reliability, security, and upgrade readiness. The company has shipped Cardano node versions 10.5.4 and 10.6.2, with improvements to network connectivity, system monitoring, and support for future protocol releases, including v11 and v12.
KES Agent has also reached version 1.0. The tool decouples cryptographic key management from the masternode process, reducing the key-related attack surface for stake pool operators. The IO directly links this work to the needs of Cardano’s over 3,000 stake pools.
UTXO HD was another key element of the infrastructure. By moving the UTXO pool from memory to disk, IO said Cardano node memory usage decreased by up to 80%. This is important for operators because lower memory requirements can reduce infrastructure costs and make running nodes less resource intensive.
Mithril, Hydra, and Leos all access the working code
The expansion was presented as a three-track strategy rather than a single upgrade. Mithril It has reached its first stable release, with distribution 2603.1 adding support for the decentralized message queue protocol. This brings Mithril closer to operating without a central coordinator, IO said.
Hydra Moved to production-oriented work, with versions 1.0.0 to 1.3.0. The report highlighted faster node restarts, on-chain synchronization drift reports, commit and decommit fixes, and active work with real users. It also cited Pondora’s Echo as the first non-custodial Hydra app and pointed to the VTech Hydra SDK.
LeosCardano’s base layer throughput upgrade produced its first working prototype. The prototype now produces and distributes endorsement blocks in a multi-node local network, including large blocks containing hundreds of transactions and optional simulated network delays, the IO company said.
Beyond scaling, IO focused on developer tools and formal methods. Plutus received the features of a Van Rossem hard fork, faster flattened decoding, improved integer primitives, and improved base tools. Cardano High Assurance has provided early access to five companies testing automated formal verification at the UPLC level.
Research also remained part of the delivery narrative. The IO said Action Package 25 has been closed with all funding stages completed following a public consultation reaching more than 24,000 people. Two papers were published in Financial Cryptography 2026, and IO chief scientist Professor Aggelos Kiayias was named an ACM Fellow.
Looking to the future, IO listed several Q2 goals: version 11 of the Intersect-orchestrated hard fork protocol, Node v10.7, Mithril 2608, the public Leios testnet, work package 26, and cryptographic tools for the Blockchain Workshop at Eurocrypt 2026.
At press time, Cardano was trading at $0.2491.
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