Cardano Foundation Monthly Update: June 2026

June marked the start of a multi-year partnership between SENAI São Paulo and the Cardano Foundation. A new open standard for agentic AI transactions launched with the Foundation as a founding participant, and Point Zero Forum put Zurich at the center of conversations on programmable finance and digital identity, giving the Foundation’s teams an opportunity to discuss with some of the world's leading regulators and institutions.

From Switzerland to Brazil, we kept working to ensure Cardano becomes the trust infrastructure used around the world.

Putting Cardano to practical use

Writing in Handelszeitung's 20 CEOs. 20 Opinions supplement, CEO Frederik Gregaard argued that the biggest barrier to financial transparency is not technology but habit: banks already have the tools, auditors already have the means, and we already have the infrastructure to let anyone verify in real time what an institution is claiming; all that remains is to put things in practice.

Fortune Magazine included Cardano on its 2026 list of Crypto Innovators, placing it in the “Blockchains and Protocols” category, which speaks to Cardano's qualities as an enterprise blockchain across multiple industries. The 30 companies and projects were selected from more than 150 nominations. The list itself spans institutional wealth managers, analytics firms, DeFi protocols, and traditional financial institutions moving into digital assets. Cardano's inclusion puts it in company with names like State Street, DBS Bank, and Maple Finance.

This enterprise readiness also became visible in a recent Syngenta Foundation India project. Working alongside 5am.Earth, AI Quant, Anastasia Labs, Andamio, and Syngenta Foundation India registered 15,000 farms on Cardano with satellite-verified land and sustainability records. The platform combines Earth Observation data with decentralized identifiers (DIDs) to create tamper-resistant digital records for individual farm parcels, reusable across finance, insurance, government programs, and agricultural trade without being recreated for each context. The system is designed to scale toward one million farmers without a proportional rise in cost.

The project’s team joined one of the latest episodes of Cardano Seminar to go deeper into the 5am.earth model. They explained its phygital approach, the role of decentralized IDs in connecting smallholder farmers to financial and market systems, and the journey from initial pilots to thousands of on-chain transactions.

Trivolve Tech, a product studio building custom blockchain and AI solutions, reached 100,000 transactions on Cardano with its Forensic Management System, the first enterprise-grade project to surpass that milestone on Cardano mainnet. The system secures forensic data on-chain to protect the integrity of records on which human rights protections depend. When the crime evidence underpinning accountability cannot be altered or disputed after the fact, the infrastructure doing that work has to be public and verifiable by design so that any attempts to tamper with evidence become immediately visible.

The Foundation also joined the UNDP Blockchain Advisory Group, building on earlier work with UNDP's Tadamon program, which helped aid-delivery organizations establish verifiable identity to reduce fraud and build trust. The advisory group enables ongoing contributions to sustainable development work using blockchain infrastructure.

Ada was included in the new Nasdaq and CME Group crypto index futures alongside Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other assets, placing Cardano within the same institutional investment infrastructure that shapes how capital allocators worldwide build and manage exposure to digital assets.

Deepening the infrastructure developers can use

BloxBean's new Analytics Store, built with Foundation support, makes the full history of the Cardano blockchain accessible without having to run dedicated infrastructure to retrieve it. Packaged as portable open files that anyone can work with on a laptop, the store removes the server and storage overhead that previously put serious on-chain analysis out of reach for smaller teams. It is open source and free to use.

During June, Yaci Store’s v3.0.0-beta3 also expanded support for epoch, address, block, metadata, and Blockfrost-compatible APIs. It likewise provided an API to withdraw rewards from indexed data and added epoch nonce calculation support, Scalus-backed transaction evaluation, and generic admin CLI index apply command. In addition, it exposed raw cost models array in protocol parameters.

The Yaci DevKit, on the other hand, updated the kit’s defaults to version 11 of the Cardano node and protocol. It also now includes support for Yano, a lightweight Cardano devnet node that makes running local networks compatible with version 11 of the Cardano node easier and faster. Finally, Yaci’s developer kit now offers support for Model Context Protocol (MCP), giving users server integration for tools like Claude Code.

Ogmios v7.0.0 similarly changed its dependencies and compatibility to version 11 of the Cardano node. Another important update is added preliminary support for Cardano’s Dijkstra era, which will see optimizations to PlutusV4. Dijkstra will also enable nested transactions and enhance account addresses to support micropayments as well as lower transaction costs.

Some key fixes were implemented on Aiken’s v1.1.23. On top of it, Aiken’s latest version ensured compatibility of the virtual machine’s cost model with the upcoming Van Rossem hard fork.

LayerZero outlined the rollout plan for what will be the largest interoperability deployment in Cardano's history: an integration with a protocol that has over $75 billion in total value of assets secured. More than 800 tokens will be able to move natively to Cardano, connecting the ecosystem directly to the assets, applications, and liquidity already flowing across crypto at a scale no single integration has reached before.

The phased delivery will cover testnet and mainnet endpoints, Stargate (LayerZero's liquidity and bridging layer), developer tooling, and full product integrations across the LayerZero stack. The goal is to ensure that any crypto asset originating on any blockchain can be deployed on Cardano.

The Leios public testnet went live, developed in collaboration with Input Output and Intersect. Leios aims to scale Cardano's throughput significantly through Endorser Blocks and committee-based validation. This public testnet gives developers and researchers a first opportunity to engage with it directly.

At the same time, the Legal Context Protocol (LCP) launched with the Foundation as a founding participant alongside the American Arbitration Association, Google, IBM, Circle, Wayfair, and a broader industry coalition. As agentic systems grow in scope, the LCP addresses the legal accountability and institutional frameworks that determine whether agentic systems can be trusted and enforced.

While payment rails show what was paid and identity systems show who acted, neither captures the legal terms governing the transaction, the applicable jurisdiction, or the dispute-resolution process the parties agreed to follow. The LCP protocol establishes an open standard for making legal terms, consent, and dispute resolution discoverable and verifiable when AI agents transact on behalf of people and organizations.

The programmable tokens standard that the Foundation has been spearheading received confirmation of compatibility from BaFin, Germany's federal financial supervisory authority, and one of Europe's most significant regulatory bodies for digital assets. It was also confirmed as compatible with CMTAT, the open-source token standard widely used for the issuance of regulated securities in Switzerland. These milestones provide extra assurance for the institutions preparing to build on the programmable tokens standard.

IBC connectivity launched on testnets. Injective – an interoperable blockchain optimized for DeFi – implemented the Cardano IBC module, with the beta version already live on testnet. This allows Cardano DApps to swap tokens or exchange messages with protocols on the Injective testnet — and soon also on Injective’s mainnet —, as well as with the wider Cosmos ecosystem.

Issues in the Injective module were resolved following their internal audit, and stability improvements were also made to the Caribic service tool across multiple operating systems and development environments. Together, these updates strengthen the reliability of the underlying infrastructure that will allow different blockchains to communicate and transfer data directly with Cardano.

At the same time, the Foundation is preparing Tessera together with the Cardano community. Leveraging the CIP-0179 standard for on-chain surveys, this browser app will allow others to create, browse, reply to, and tally on-chain surveys and polls on the Cardano blockchain.

We also completed hard fork readiness work ahead of the Van Rosen upgrade, releasing hard-fork-ready versions of the ada Handles resolver and the Cardano Foundation Token Metadata Registry v1.6.0.

Every project building on Cardano can now claim a free Pyth Pro API key for one year with no usage caps, providing access to the same institutional-grade pricing data layer that DEXs, lending protocols, and stablecoin issuers rely on for collateral pricing, reference rates, and on-chain risk management. The offer was made available through the Cardano Critical Integrations project, led by the Pentad, of which the Foundation is a member alongside Input Output, EMURGO, the Midnight Foundation, and Intersect. Teams can reach out directly to the Pyth team to get onboarded.

Developer Office Hours ran three focused sessions in June. Matthieu Pizenberg, Senior Software Engineer at the Cardano Foundation, explored elm-cardano's path to v1.0, covering recent progress and remaining milestones. Elm's strong type architecture eliminates entire categories of common client-side errors by design, making it a particularly well-suited language for building reliable Web3 application frontends.

Santiago Carmuega, CEO and Founder of TxPipe, walked the audience through Dolos, a lightweight Cardano data node built in Rust. Unlike full nodes that participate in block validation and network consensus, which normally require significantly more processing power and storage, Dolos is purpose-built for query serving and ledger state tracking. The session covered its architecture and production use cases.

Finally, Alex Nemish and Oleksii Khodakivskyi from the Lantr team discussed the Scalus Development Platform, an integrated JVM-native stack for Cardano designed to build mission-critical protocols such as layer 2 solutions and bridges. They recounted the platform's three-year evolution from a Catalyst-funded smart contract language into a comprehensive development ecosystem, one that features advanced transaction building, an in-memory Cardano node emulator for rapid testing, and extensive security and design pattern documentation. The session highlighted how Scalus streamlines development by providing a unified, enterprise-grade environment, enabling teams to go from idea to a testable prototype in as little as two months without stitching together multiple libraries.

Education, acceleration, and collaboration

The Cardano Foundation and SENAI São Paulo announced a strategic multi-year partnership that combines SENAI's educational and industrial network with the expertise of the Foundation and Cardano Academy in enterprise blockchain infrastructure. The first phase began with two workshops, one for SENAI personnel with little to no prior knowledge of blockchain, and a second one for a technical audience comprising developers and researchers. These immersive workshops covered blockchain fundamentals, metadata standards, smart contracts, industrial use cases, and active solution architecture, including traceability systems and Industrial Digital Product Passports (DPPs).

Upon completion, 130 professionals across SENAI's R&D and Education functions will be onboarded. A two-year roadmap extends the collaboration further, encompassing ongoing certification programs, executive blockchain training, blockchain-focused masterclasses, industrial proof-of-concept projects, and co-developed innovation tracks with industry partners.

The third edition of the Node Diversity workshop took place in Porto, gathering Cardano developers for a deep dive into Ouroboros Leios, a new flavour of Cardano’s proof-of-stake protocol that looks to significantly increase the network’s throughput and scalability. As with previous editions of the workshop, the Foundation sent a delegation to contribute to discussions and align on next steps.

A year after it began, the Unified Global Events Marketing Strategy – developed in collaboration with EMURGO, Intersect, and the Rare Network, and supported by treasury funding – has delivered results that exceed all major KPIs. Across 20 events spanning Rio, Nairobi, Singapore, Hong Kong, Miami, Paris, and more, the strategy brought 76 Cardano ecosystem projects to over 7,500 people, engaged 1,139 developers, supported 795 wallet creations, generated 855 Cardano Academy sign-ups, and produced 95 pieces of media coverage. One event, WebX in Asia, remains ahead.

Meanwhile, the Cardano Accelerator Program closed its application window for the Fall '26 cohort, which will focus on verifiable provenance and product lifecycle. Mentor and service provider applications remain open through 10 July 2026 for those interested in supporting the cohort.

The Foundation also announced a fresh Project Catalyst pilot fund, set to launch in August 2026. This streamlined fund will focus on recent integrations, namely Pyth, stablecoins, programmable tokens, on-chain identity, and the forthcoming Brale integration. We welcome all feedback to the new approach and will share more details soon.

In the meantime, the Cardano Ambassador webpage launched in a fully revamped form on 18 June, bringing a data-driven view of the community's global footprint. The new experience includes an interactive world map, real-time contribution metrics, a searchable directory filterable by language, location, and track, and is entirely open source for direct community collaboration.

Let's Talk Cardano brought Dr. Christina Yan Zhang, CEO of the Metaverse Institute and co-chair of the UN International Telecommunication Union's metaverse task group, into conversation about the real risks of AI and where blockchain fits in. The discussion covered how national debt could be tokenized and the growing threat of AI deepfakes targeting public figures and financial institutions. It grounded blockchain's role in specific, high-stakes cases where verifiable infrastructure matters most.

Policy, governance, and institutional engagement

At the Point Zero Forum in Zurich, the Foundation participated in three sessions. CEO Frederik Gregaard joined Swiss industry leaders to discuss the path from pilots of programmable money to everyday financial infrastructure. Chief Legal Officer Nicolas Jacquemart joined Visa, Circle, and Banking Circle for a roundtable on verifiable identity and the trust layer the agentic economy depends on. Finally, a hands-on workshop led by Veridian's Thomas Mayfield and Fergal O'Connor demonstrated how Veridian and the vLEI credential reduce the cost and friction of regulatory onboarding.

The Foundation also co-hosted a follow-on session with GLEIF focused on securing agentic AI in finance. Separately, the Foundation joined GBBC for a roundtable examining how regulated financial institutions can safely move onto public blockchain infrastructure.

The Foundation published its voting rationale for the 2026 Intersect Budget Process, covering all 69 proposals and 331.5 million ada requested, making the reasoning behind each decision openly available for the community to review.

Governance Hours brought the community into direct conversation with teams behind active proposals, giving DReps and ada holders a live channel for questions before casting their votes. In addition, a Roundtable Talk on the Cardano Critical Integrations V2 proposal gathered representatives from across the Pentad walking through its scope and governance structure.

Arouet Holdings opened applications for the Cardano Community Director role, a voluntary board seat elected by DReps to help oversee treasury contributions to the Draper Dragon Orion Fund. The Constitutional Committee election process also opened through Intersect, with candidate registration giving ada holders the opportunity to put forward qualified participants for one of governance's key oversight roles.

The Foundation will be joining Rare Evo in Las Vegas next month as a Featured Exhibitor, and we’d love to see you there. Follow along on LinkedIn, X, and subscribe to the Simply Blockchain newsletter for updates in the meantime.