Cardano Foundation Monthly Update: July 2026

July brought many milestones for Cardano's adoption, development, and governance. The Van Rossem hard fork moved the network to its next protocol version, Project Catalyst's treasury finished its transfer to the Foundation, and DReps elected the next Constitutional Committee.

The reach of Cardano Summit 2025 also earned recognition, winning Best International Event at the ICE Awards in London. From a UN stage in Hamburg to a university campus in Zurich, conversations kept showing what Cardano makes possible for enterprises, builders, and entrepreneurs.

Putting blockchain to work worldwide

At the Hamburg Sustainability Conference, CEO Frederik Gregaard joined a panel with UNDP, the Stellar Development Foundation, and EY, alongside heads of state, cabinet ministers, and UN leadership, to make the case that public blockchain infrastructure can move development funding faster and more transparently.

Two examples backed that up: an advisory role shaping global policy, and a funding model already proving itself on-chain. First, the UNDP Blockchain Advisory Group, launched in June 2026 with the Foundation as a founding member among roughly 30 private sector representatives shaping how blockchain supports the UN's development goals.

Second, Project Catalyst's early seeding of the UNDP SDG Blockchain Accelerator has since produced UNDP's flagship blockchain report, with 21 of its 42 use cases built on Cardano. One graduate, Plastiks, now runs verified plastic recovery pilots with UNDP across Armenia, El Salvador, India, and Zambia. Days before the panel, the Cardano community had approved roughly $1.5 million in treasury funding to scale 5am.earth's verifiable farm and land records toward 500,000 smallholder farmers over the next 18 months.

In a companion article for Table.Briefings published alongside the conference, Gregaard argued that the capital to fund this work already exists; what's missing are the systems to move it. He laid out three ways blockchain closes that gap. Settlement runs 24/7, so capital doesn't idle in approval chains. Public ledgers make the flow of funds permanently auditable. Staking models like the With Refugees stake pool (WRFGS) let donated capital secure the network, while the rewards fund field operations and the principal itself never moves.

In his op-ed for CoinDesk, Gregaard explored how to protect children online without creating new privacy risks. He discussed how age verification systems should prioritize data minimization and privacy over the unnecessary collection of personal information.

Cardano's growing portfolio of practical applications

Users of Reef Data eG, a Hamburg-based data cooperative, can now download the app and opt in to share their data, the first step toward payment flows that will be recorded transparently and auditably on-chain using Reeve, the Foundation's open-source reporting platform.

The Global Blockchain Business Council (GBBC) featured Reeve as use case #56 in its 101 Real-World Blockchain Use Cases Handbook, recognized for anchoring tamper-evident audit attestations for regulated financial reporting on-chain while keeping the underlying figures confidential.

The Foundation tested the approach on its own books, working with Grant Thornton Switzerland/Liechtenstein to anchor a signed external audit attestation on Cardano. The report also featured Plastiks' plastic recovery work with UNDP, joint verifiable identity research with GLEIF, and the staking-based fundraising model behind Switzerland for UNHCR.

Let's Talk Cardano sat down with Ivan Branco, who leads information management, AI, and analytics for Volvo Group's truck operations in Belgium, to make the case for blockchain on business terms. Branco's conclusion was clear: the technology is ready; culture remains the harder problem to solve.

Pricing data that DEXs, lending protocols, and stablecoin issuers rely on saw stronger institutional support, with Nasdaq coming on board with Pyth following its recent integration with Cardano.

In partnership with Toto Finance, the Foundation joined the Energy Tokenization Sandbox, run by Lava Network and Electric Blue, opening a route for energy assets to be tested and tokenized on Cardano.

Sandro Knöpfel, the Foundation's Global Lead for Market Structure and Strategic Partnerships, joined WisdomTree's Crypto Clarified podcast to make the case that blockchain succeeds once nobody talks about it anymore. He covered why tokenization only works if the full value chain is solved and not just issuance, what enterprise AI adoption reveals about an identity problem nobody has solved yet, and how verifiable legal entity identifiers (vLEIs) are already making on-chain financial attestation legible to regulators and auditors.

At the WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin, CEO Frederik Gregaard and Mariana de la Roche Wills of BlackVogel addressed the question of liability as AI agents increasingly delegate tasks to other agents across organizations and jurisdictions. They discussed how every agent needs a verifiable identity and an audit trail nobody can edit, something a public ledger can witness without needing to run the agent itself. Masumi is already putting that argument into practice: agents on Cardano carry verifiable identities, and every interaction between them is anchored by a micropayment that doubles as the compliance record.

In Recife, the educators, researchers, and engineers who design and build Brazil's next generation of technology got hands-on with Cardano themselves, in a three-day workshop the Foundation ran with CESAR, one of the country's leading Science, Technology and Innovation organizations, with a client base that spans the likes of Petrobras, Stellantis, Volvo, and Dell across sectors including oil and gas, mobility, and energy.

Foundation team members Guilherme Pereira and Lincon Vidal led the sessions on the ground, while ecosystem partners from Blockforce, UVerify, and UNDP joined remotely to show what they're building on Cardano. With CESAR deeply embedded in Brazil's industrial R&D landscape, the reach here goes well beyond the classroom and opens a direct path to practical blockchain adoption.

Supporting a growing network of builders

Cardano builders moved the network forward again, supporting its resilience and use case diversity. The Van Rossem hard fork initiation action was ratified at the epoch boundary on 13 July 2026 at 21:45 UTC, with enactment following on 18 July at the same time, the latest step in keeping infrastructure current with the network's progress.

Cardano became an Associate Member of x402 under the Linux Foundation, an open payment standard that lets applications and AI agents pay per request in stablecoins without needing an account, an API key, or a checkout page. Cardano ecosystem projects like Masumi and ODATANO are already putting the standard to use. Implementation work is expanding too, with a Java facilitator now in development to bring more diversity to the repository. The standard's three existing payment types, address-to-address, script-based, and agent-to-agent through Masumi, are all currently built in TypeScript.

Enterprises weighing blockchain for regulated workflows can now get proof without exposure, at any scale, using cryptographic primitives already live on Cardano. The Foundation's engineering team published a technical walkthrough of Aiken's BLS12-381 primitives, now production-ready, which let Cardano smart contracts verify thousands of signatures for the cost of one, with no oracle or external service required. They also support three concrete enterprise needs: sustainable multi-party approval at scale, publicly verifiable outcomes that keep the underlying data private, and credentials that reveal a single claim, such as licensed or accredited, while everything else stays private.

Developer Office Hours ran four sessions, each aimed at a different gap in the toolkit. Thomas Kammerlocher, Senior Full-Stack Developer at the Cardano Foundation, walked through the CIP-113 KYC substandard and how to implement it in practice. Matthieu Pizenberg introduced Tessera, an on-chain survey application implementing CIP-0179, giving developers a working example of how to build transparent on-chain voting and survey tools. Chris Gianelloni, CEO of Blink Labs, traced the evolution of naming systems from DNS and ICANN through Handshake to cDNSd, for developers exploring decentralized naming and open internet infrastructure. Satya Ranjan, Lead Blockchain Architect at the Foundation, closed things out with an update on the Java ecosystem and the newest tools available to Java developers building on Cardano.

Cardano and Injective, an interoperable blockchain built for DeFi, are now connected via IBC on testnet, making Injective the first blockchain with a live on-chain IBC rail to Cardano. Once the connection reaches mainnet, ada and INJ will be usable across the two ecosystems.

Security work also moved forward on the programmable tokens standard. The Foundation addressed CIP-0113 vulnerabilities identified during a recent audit, drafted a federated update path for protocol contract upgradeability, and completed the CMTA extension, now awaiting merge by Fluid Tokens.

The Foundation's cardano-templates repository, a resource developers can learn from directly, also grew with new smart contract examples contributed by the Lantr team behind Scalus.

A Foundation research paper, "Reserve Depletion and Security Runway in Proof-of-Stake Systems," was accepted to AFT 2026, developing a mathematical framework for studying whether transaction fees can sustain validator incentives once a proof-of-stake (PoS) system's finite reserve is depleted. The findings speak directly to validators and SPOs thinking about the network's long-term economics.

For builders looking for structure and accountability rather than just a weekend sprint, the Piece of Pie Builder Season Hackathon, run by Gimbalabs in partnership with the Foundation, wrapped after twelve weeks of public building. More than 30 builders started the program, and 15 projects qualified for the Cardano Pie by building on the network and deploying to mainnet with a working payment flow; three of those projects gained users along the way. Every qualifying project was built in public and is available on GitHub, with the full showcase collected in the Piece of Pie Yearbook.

A Developer Spotlight interview with Raul De Benedittis, CEO and co-founder of Nuvola Digital and Vola Network, traced how his background in aerospace, naval, and medical quality assurance led him to blockchain, and why Nuvola chose Cardano as the settlement and security layer for decentralized storage and compute infrastructure designed to keep the underlying technology invisible to everyday users.

Campus collaboration and accessible education

The University of Zurich's Blockchain Center hosted its seventh annual Blockchain Summer School, showing where the next Cardano builders come from. At the Cardano x UZH Meetup, Professor Claudio J. Tessone opened on why turning a student idea into a shipped project belongs in a university classroom at all. Cardano Foundation CFO Stephen Wood shared real-world examples of blockchain adoption, while founders Patrick Tobler, tracing how NMKR and Masumi grew from a student-sized idea, and Raul De Benedittis, on the decisions behind Nuvola Digital, brought the builder's perspective. An alumni spotlight closed the loop, with former Summer School participants returning to show the path works.

In another session, Dr. Manvir Schneider, a Research Scientist at the Foundation, walked students through why Cardano works the way it does. The Extended UTXO model verifies transactions before they're sent, and Ouroboros' verifiable random function privately assigns block-producing slots. On-chain governance has run since the Voltaire era, with Delegated Representatives (DReps), Stake Pool Operators (SPOs), and a Constitutional Committee all holding a vote, and a roughly 1.5 billion ada treasury funds community projects through that same direct on-chain voting.

The program's biggest win belonged to the students themselves. A Summer School team built Pacy, which turns a prescription into a token. A doctor issues it, a pharmacy redeems it, and a smart contract checks that both are licensed before a patient scans a QR code to collect their medicine, with refills capped so a prescription can't be reused or forged. The project took first prize, and for the first time, every Summer School student worked through a Cardano Academy course sequence built for the program, preparing them for the Cardano Blockchain Certified Associate (CBCA) certification.

The Cardano Academy launched two new courses, each aimed at a different gap. Trust & Digital Identity: Future-Proof Your Enterprise tackles what the course calls the internet's oldest unsolved problem, proving who you are, and introduces Veridian alongside the Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) and vLEI standards enterprises can build on today. Cardano Governance: Applied takes a hands-on approach, walking learners through setting up a wallet, registering as a representative, and drafting, submitting, and voting on a proposal, all on a testnet before anything touches the real network.

The road ahead for Catalyst and governance

Project Catalyst's stewardship transfer to the Cardano Foundation was completed in full, closing out a process the community has been tracking for a while. The treasury executed a donation of 19,498,234 ada, reimbursing all funds earmarked for Fund 15 aside from the 501,766 ada set aside to compensate F15 reviewers and moderators, while the Intersect-administered smart contract for Fund 16 and RPGF was canceled, returning 21,000,000 ada to the Cardano treasury.

What comes next is already taking shape. The webpage for the new Catalyst pilot went live, sharing details on the 2.5 million ada fund launching in August to support and reward projects with a vision to scale and bring long-term value to Cardano, with the submission portal opening in the coming weeks.

Governance Hour took a closer look at Se7en Labs' proposal for Daedalus Wallet maintenance and improvements, covering the protocol upgrades, hardware wallet support, and performance work the treasury withdrawal would fund to keep Cardano's full-node desktop wallet secure and current.

Ada holders had a direct say in the 2026 Constitutional Committee election, which decides who reviews whether governance actions comply with the Cardano Constitution, one of the most consequential roles in Cardano governance. The Foundation's own votes, cast as one DRep among many, went to Gbiri Oluwaseun (Olokoji), Marek Mahut, Cardano Curia, and the Asia Africa Cardano Coalition.

A separate Roundtable Talk went beyond the usual candidate introductions for that race, pressing candidates on workload, transparency, constitutional interpretation, and whether the current incentive model can support long-term participation, giving DReps more than a resume to vote on.

The Foundation also turned that same lens on its own process, publishing a forum post sharing its initial thinking on what the future of Cardano's community engagement and governance could look like, opening the floor for feedback, also available in Japanese translation.

In Tokyo, the Foundation, Intersect, and EMURGO hosted a workshop that gave DReps and community members a direct channel to shape that process, drawing more than 25 attendees and an in-depth presentation from the Foundation's Governance Lead. Discussion covered where the current process falls short, from information overload and proposal fatigue to the lack of a shared strategic direction, and generated concrete ideas the Foundation shared in a recent recap.

Cardano’s presence around the world

The same trip to Tokyo carried the Foundation from governance workshops into a bigger milestone. One year after it began, the Unified Global Events Marketing Strategy wrapped at WebX Asia. Run in collaboration with EMURGO, Intersect, and the Rare Network and supported by treasury funding, the year-long series presented Cardano as a unified brand across 20 events spanning Paris, Rio, Miami, Nairobi, and more.

This approach also enabled the Foundation to highlight 76 Cardano projects from across the ecosystem to enterprises, investors, and developers around the world. Anyone looking to track what's next can now do so more easily too, using the newly revamped events page with filters to search past, current, and upcoming events across the ecosystem.

Frederik Gregaard also closed out the strategy himself, joining a panel on the Binance Stage, hosted by Martin Arnold, Financial Regulation Editor, The Financial Times, on stablecoins and the new payments stack alongside representatives from SWIFT, the Federal Reserve, and O-Bank.

Cardano Summit 2025 won Best International Event at the ICE Awards in London, recognition for six events across five continents and more than 4,300 attendees. The Foundation's Global Events Lead, Elis Moormaa, credited regional partners, each shaped by their own local priorities, including EMURGO, Rare Network, Wada, ADA Solar, Catalyst Africa Town Hall, Lido Nation, and RemoStart.

As voted on by DReps, the Foundation confirmed it will take over responsibility for delivering the Cardano booth at TOKEN2049, keeping the ecosystem visible at one of the industry's biggest gatherings, and is separately organizing a Cardano x Draper x Bitcoin side event funded jointly by Draper and the Foundation.

The Cardano booth at Rare Evo in Las Vegas delivered live demos, governance conversations, hardware wallet raffles, and plenty of familiar faces from across the community.

That presence continues into August, when the Foundation joins Blockchain Leaders 2026 in Rio de Janeiro as a Diamond Sponsor on 11 August, followed immediately by a Platinum Sponsorship of Blockchain Rio the next day.

The momentum carries into September, too. Both Frederik Gregaard and Sandro Knöpfel will take to the stage at the European Blockchain Convention in Barcelona on 16-17 September, where the Foundation holds Gold Sponsor status. Gregaard will also speak at CV Summit in Zurich on 29-30 September, where the Foundation is a Gold Partner.

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