Cardano Foundation Activity Report 2024
2024 brought remarkable achievements we can all be proud of
Word about the power of Cardano is spreading. This year, the Cardano Foundation was honored to sit with ministers, heads of states, education institutes, CEOs, developers, and even NASA. In each of these meetings, we showed how Cardano can improve and contribute to a fairer, more efficient, and more transparent world for everyone.
None of this could be achieved without the incredible Cardano community: the developers, the innovators, the enthusiasts and the independent thinkers who take their ownership in this ecosystem seriously. In the close to five years that I’ve had the privilege of being CEO of the Cardano Foundation, countless talented, intelligent, and passionate people have grown this blockchain beyond expectation, consistently making the seemingly impossible possible. Now, Cardano stands on the precipice of a new era: an era of decentralization and governance that will propel the utility of this blockchain into the future.
We must acknowledge that this comes not just with opportunity but with challenges too.
Growth often presents real discomfort. We have seen it in the discourse, debates, and—yes, sometimes—politics that have surrounded Cardano in the past year, both from within and outside the community. It is in those moments that we need perseverance, patience, and an acknowledgment that all of us believe strongly in the power of Cardano. With time, patience, and a commitment to finding common ground, all of us in this ecosystem will do great things.
A look back at 2024
The Cardano Foundation made strides in 2024, including the launch of the Rust node, working towards fully decentralized governance (with the development of multiple constitutions by the community), and the growth of the Cardano ecosystem with leading institutions and banks. We continue to drive forward our key focus areas of adoption, education, and operational resilience.
Adoption
In 2024, we built on previous successes. In addition to existing partnerships with such established organizsations as the United Nations Development Programme, the Georgian wine industry, Unbox, and more, we added divergent new partnerships and use cases throughout the past year, including a unique ballistic identification system, an innovative way to verify real estate transactions, and a use case for NASA. These projects are impressive, but they serve a greater purpose than that; they showcase what blockchain can truly do, further proving the technology’s utility beyond cryptocurrency.
We were pleased to soft launch Reeve, an enterprise-grade accounting function that enables organizations to enhance transparency and build trust through secure and verifiable financial data using blockchain. The Cardano Foundation also delivered several new technical projects and improvements that optimize usability and accessibility, improve the developer experience, and ultimately increase the adoption of Cardano beyond those developers fluent in Haskell.
That includes the hugely popular Aiken smart contracting language, the implementation of a protocol that bridges Cardano to a broader interchain ecosystem of over 115 interconnected blockchains, and several Java and programming updates that make Cardano easier to utilize than ever. Coupled with our ever-increasing commitment to open-source development, including the launch of the PRAGMA association, the Cardano Foundation is working to make Cardano accessible to all.
Education
At the core of our activities is a consistent commitment to education, whether that be through new education programs or partnerships or with the launch of our new website and branding. We work to demystify blockchain and to engage stakeholders from across society—from the public and individual developers to regulators and enterprises. Increasing the average stakeholders’ knowledge of the blockchain will serve to futureproof the technology in a way few other initiatives can. Our engagement with regulators also, including submitting to consultation calls and speaking to representatives, shows our seriousness in working with those who can herald the application of blockchain for the public good.
Finally, our packed and intensive events schedule, which numbered hundreds of hours in 2024, allows us to engage with people from across the world, from our thriving and passionate community to heads of industry and all in between.
Operational resilience
I remain hugely proud of the continuous operation of the Cardano network, which is one of the rare ecosystems to have never had downtime in its history. That resilience is not accidental: It is the result of the hard work, monitoring, and deep knowledge of the network that comes from our community, Cardano developers, and the teams across Cardano, including our dedicated teams in the Cardano Foundation. The work to ensure operational resilience continued in 2024, both to identify and eliminate any potential weaknesses and to safeguard against any future challenges. In addition to enhancing the resilience of the network through a public transaction (congestion) monitoring service and the implementation of a bug bounty program, we continued to contribute to work ahead of the arrival of Ouroboros Genesis and supported the implementation of the Chang hard fork ahead of decentralized governance. We will continue to build upon this operational resilience as Cardano continues to grow, highlighting Cardano as the reliable and exceptional tool that we know it to be.
A look to the future
In 2025, Cardano will change. How that change goes depends on the community and those reading these words. Too often, the focus is on markets—whether they’re bull or bear and how much the value of a cryptocurrency rises. That short-term thinking hugely undercuts the immense potential and value of the blockchain, especially the Cardano ecosystem, which is the blockchain of the future. Cardano stands proud as one of the best-equipped blockchain ecosystems in the world.
Yet, innovation has to follow. I was struck recently by a conversation that I had with a number of government ministers and business leaders. In a short meeting, they described the challenges for which they were desperately seeking blockchain solutions. As they spoke, it dawned on me that the solutions they were seeking were ones I had seen delivered by the Cardano Foundation and the Cardano community two to three years ago. Business leaders, governments, and organizations are hungry for the answers our blockchain can provide to them. My challenge to you is to seek them out and to show them what Cardano is really capable of.
While we can be proud of the incredible toolkit that we at the Cardano Foundation have built and provided, now is the time for developers, integration engineers, and solution architects who live by implementing to show what can really be done. Entrepreneurs, coding experts, integration engineers, project managers, and blockchain enthusiasts need to rise to the challenge and explore the opportunities for building real-world solutions and products that the market is crying out for.
With the continuing evolution toward decentralization and self-governance, the future of Cardano is not a foregone conclusion—and therein lies the beauty of this wonderful ecosystem that I’m proud to be a part of heralding toward its next chapter. That’s why, for 2025, the Cardano Foundation will be moving to three new central focuses: technology, governance, and adoption. The keys to the long-term success of Cardano are in every ada-holder’s hands. Now, let’s all pick up that challenge and prove to the world what Cardano can do.
The Foundation’s 2024 Activity Report can be found here.