Cardano Foundation Monthly Update: May 2026

May saw the CME Group introduce ada futures, the announcement of a three-year partnership with the Brazilian Olympic Committee, and an active governance period with 20 on-chain actions.

At the same time, the Cardano Accelerator Program (CAP) moved its Spring cohort toward Demo Day and opened applications for Fall ‘26, new Cardano Academy content connected blockchain to AI and practical asset infrastructure, and conversations from Miami to Zurich to São Paulo kept Cardano present in the enterprise discussions shaping digital finance and institutional adoption.

Putting blockchain into practice

The Draper Dragon Orion Fund entered its initial deployment phase in May, with the Cardano Foundation serving as the constitutional administrator for the $80 million strategic ecosystem fund. Structured to back projects building on Cardano while returning value to the treasury over time, the fund is now actively investing in the next phase of ecosystem growth.

Pyth Pro went live on Cardano, bringing a pricing layer for perpetuals, synthetics, lending, tokenized assets, and equity-linked products to every builder working on Cardano. The Foundation's technical team supported the architectural and structuring phase alongside Intersect.

Cardano was also integrated into Scorechain's full compliance and investigation framework, enabling risk scoring, entity attribution, and transaction monitoring for ada and Cardano native tokens built for the UTXO model, so that multi-chain compliance teams can handle Cardano within the same workflows used for other major assets.

Regulated, exchange-traded access to ada became a reality as Cardano futures launched for 24/7 trading on CME Group, one of the world's most established derivatives markets. Products like these are how institutional participation takes concrete shape.

The Cardano Foundation and the Brazilian Olympic Committee announced a three-year partnership to bring public blockchain, IoT, and AI into Olympic sports management. The roadmap covers four areas: identity and certification, fan engagement, equipment tracking, and governance and transparency. COB will set a global benchmark for how a national sporting body operates on a public blockchain. The first executive workshop has taken place, with institutional pilots to follow.

A strategic partnership with the University of Brasília and the launch of the first Cardano Project Development Lab in Latin America mark a meaningful step forward for blockchain research, education, and applied blockchain development across the region.

Engaging policymakers, markets, and builders worldwide

Throughout the month, the Foundation joined key conversations on verifiable infrastructure and global finance. CEO Frederik Gregaard appeared on the NYSE's Taking Stock program, attended the Point Zero Forum in Zurich alongside global regulators and policymakers, and contributed a piece to Forbes Tech Council on the governance challenges that agentic AI is creating for enterprises.

At the 8th Nordic Blockchain Conference in Stockholm, Frederik Gregaard delivered a keynote on The Integrity Economy: Why Digital Trust is the New Global Currency. The following day, two ventures from the Cardano Accelerator Program, NOBON and The Mint, joined the RWAs and Tokenization panel alongside BlackRock, BitMEX, Aryze, and Realjuridik.

The DARTE Paris 2.0 report was also published, addressing interpretive gaps in European regulation across MiCAR, stablecoin issuance, and self-hosted wallets.

At the Crypto Valley Conference in Switzerland, Gregaard delivered a keynote on engineering trust into the architecture of digital markets, while Sandro Knöpfel led a workshop on where tokenization is creating durable value and why governance and verifiable identity are essential for scalable digital finance.

Rafael Fraga, LatAm Business Developer Lead at the Foundation, joined leading market voices at the Official Pre-Launch of Blockchain Rio in São Paulo to discuss how tokenization is transforming asset infrastructure across global markets.

As a sponsor at Consensus Miami, Cardano brought the ecosystem together through a unified booth for a week of engagement with developers, enterprises, and institutional stakeholders.

Maturing the infrastructure developers build on

Amaru is a community-led alternative node implementation, with the Foundation contributing approximately 40% of the development workforce. The project advanced across several areas in May.

Additional ledger rules were implemented to deepen conformance with the Cardano protocol, and a new bootstrapping tool makes spinning up Amaru nodes considerably more straightforward. Further updates included:

• Dynamic peer selection and diffusion for both blocks and transactions, improving network propagation and resilience
• Local transaction submission and peer validation, expanding the node's capabilities for interacting with the network
• An epoch transition fix ensuring correct protocol handling across epoch boundaries

Reflecting the project's growing independence, Antithesis management was transferred directly from the Foundation to the Amaru project. Amaru is now utilizing Antithesis for testing in simulated clusters, and is not alone in doing so, with the Dingo and Leios teams also leveraging the platform, all provided and funded by Amaru. Antithesis is a deterministic testing platform that simulates complex distributed system environments, allowing teams to identify bugs and verify network behavior under a wide range of conditions. Projects interested in harnessing the platform are welcome to reach out.

With the Van Rosen hard fork approaching, hard fork readiness shaped much of the tooling work across the month. Cardano Foundation Rosetta Java v2.2.0 was updated for Protocol Version 11 compatibility, the Cardano Foundation Token Metadata Registry v1.6.0 was made hard-fork-ready, and upgrades to Kupo and Ogmios are underway to ensure continued compatibility across the ecosystem. Yaci Store v2.0.1 is live and Protocol Version 11-ready, with key highlights including:

• Improved governance calculations for DRep voting, proposals, committees, and rewards.
• Governance and ledger state data now aligns with DBSync across public networks.
• New APIs for rewards, proposals, and governance statistics.
• Scalus-backed transaction evaluation enabled by default.
• Enhanced Docker deployment support and stability improvements.

Developers building on Yaci Store should upgrade before the hard fork to ensure uninterrupted syncing.

Aiken v1.1.22 shipped with bug fixes and low-level optimizations, and the standard library gained new "forcible" primitives, giving developers additional building blocks for on-chain logic.

The Cardano Foundation contributed to a community-led open source BLS cryptography library for Aiken, improving its usability, and published end-to-end examples covering key and signature aggregation as well as on-chain VRF to give developers concrete patterns to build from. The Foundation also published a tutorial on optimizing Aiken programs, developed from a Buidler Fest talk and including execution unit benchmarks, for the community to learn from directly.

Work on x402 continued to mature, with SDK packages now implemented for NPM, Maven, Python, and Go, extending the reach of Cardano's standardized payment infrastructure for AI agents and Web3 applications. A pull request was submitted to the x402 Foundation, incorporating a community contribution to support broader adoption.

On the interoperability front, pull requests were submitted to Injective and Osmosis to integrate the Cardano light client. This represents further progress toward IBC connectivity, a standard protocol that enables different blockchains to communicate and transfer data.

The Merkle-Patricia Forest Service is advancing toward production readiness as an off-chain component for Merkle-Patricia data structures, and the ecosystem monitoring project now covers 19 of 21 Cardano blueprint examples across four different off-chain libraries, offering clearer visibility into tooling coverage across the network.

Cardano Connect with Wallet not only gained support for CIP-158, which allows DApps to launch native wallet applications directly from mobile browsers without code changes beyond a dependency upgrade, but also delivered additional improvements through CIP-45. By migrating from WebTorrent trackers to PeerJS, this cross-device wallet connectivity proposal now provides more reliable connections across devices, especially on mobile platforms.

Developer Office Hours ran five sessions in May. An ecosystem engineering showcase offered a behind-the-scenes look at active Cardano Foundation projects and tooling initiatives currently in the pipeline. A dedicated session covered the latest updates to the Aiken standard library and previewed what is arriving in Aiken v1.1.22. ODATANO introduced a framework for connecting Cardano to SAP (Systems, Applications, and Products) enterprise environments through OData, opening a pathway for enterprise developers to build on Cardano without leaving their existing systems.

The IOG Hydra team walked through the architecture and use cases of Cardano's Layer 2 scalability solution, covering performance metrics and the development roadmap. The GameChanger Wallet team demonstrated how GCScript DSL and the Universal Dapp Connector enable intent-based DApps to reach users through URLs, QR codes, and NFC with minimal integration overhead.

A feature published in JAVAPRO Magazine explored how Java developers can build on Cardano without leaving their existing stack behind. Using BloxBean, the open-source Java toolchain maintained by the Cardano Foundation and the community, the article walks through what that looks like in practice.

The Foundation co-sponsored the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit in Minneapolis alongside the Intersect Developer Experience Working Group, engaging the broader open-source community on how Cardano operates as an open-source project.

How the community shapes what comes next

Governance activity in May was particularly concentrated, with 20 active on-chain governance actions running simultaneously alongside 69 proposals submitted through the Intersect budget process. To help boost participation, the Foundation issued a public call for participation, noting that not casting a vote counts as a no vote, while abstaining removes a DRep's voting power from the calculation entirely.

Three Governance Hour sessions were held in May, each taking a closer look at active proposals and the teams behind them. Logan Panchot, co-founder of Clarity and elected board member of CBDAO, walked through the Initiative DAO Framework and the Cardano Builder DAO, covering treasury allocation, governance design, and lessons from its first operational cycle.

Carlos Lopez de Lara, Product Manager at Input Output Group, explored the Leios proposal, which aims to scale Cardano's throughput 10 to 65x through Endorser Blocks and committee-based validation while maintaining decentralization and stake pool viability. Michael Karg focused on the Core Cardano Maintenance and Operational Support proposal, covering the ongoing work required to keep Cardano secure, reliable, and performant across node maintenance, release management, monitoring, and incident response.

A roundtable focused on DRep participation and its role within Cardano governance brought together voices from across the ecosystem. The goal was not to advocate for a particular position, but to examine what is working, what is not, and what needs to change to improve participation as intended by design.

The Cardano Critical Integrations V2 proposal was submitted on-chain, requesting 23 million ada to fund the next phase of critical infrastructure. The proposal covers Year 2 costs and ongoing delivery for Circle (USDCx), LayerZero, Pyth, and Dune, alongside a native Fireblocks integration, and was brought collaboratively by the Foundation, IOG, EMURGO, and Midnight through the Pentad structure, with Intersect acting as administrator. It is now with the community to review and vote on.

As a DRep, the Foundation voted to fund Dingo, a production-grade block producer in Go developed by Blink Labs. Supporting a Go-based implementation alongside existing Haskell and Rust nodes will strengthen the multi-client ecosystem on which long-term network resilience depends. The Foundation also voted to approve itself as the new managing entity for Project Catalyst, ensuring operational continuity for Funds 10 through 14 and facilitating the return of Funds 15 and 16 to the treasury.

The Foundation published an updated framework for reviewing proposals submitted through the Intersect process, covering assessment criteria, strategic pillars, and the rationale behind individual voting decisions. Making this openly available lets the community follow the reasoning rather than just the outcome.

The Cardano Summit 2026 treasury proposal ran its full governance course during May. Following substantial community feedback, the updated proposal did not pass, finishing at 65.21% against a required 67% threshold. The Foundation accepted the outcome and respected the community's decision. EMURGO's TOKEN2049 proposal passed, and Cardano will have a strong presence there. The Cardano Foundation will also participate in a Draper Dragon side event, keeping the ecosystem present in key investor conversations. The depth of DRep engagement throughout this process reflects how seriously this community takes its governance responsibilities.

Growing the ecosystem through education and acceleration

The Cardano Academy launched a new course, AI and Blockchain for Business Leaders, developed in collaboration with the Blockchain Research Institute. The course covers how blockchain infrastructure supports verifiable AI systems and is aimed at business leaders and decision-makers looking to understand this intersection in practical terms. It is available free on Coursera through November.

A new mini-course also went live, focused on a specific use case: how a live tokenization infrastructure running on Cardano bridges physical assets with digital ownership. The course takes around 15 minutes to complete.

Applications for the Fall '26 cohort of the Cardano Accelerator Program (CAP) are now closed, but service providers and mentors interested in supporting the cohort can still apply. This cohort focuses on verifiable provenance and product lifecycle, building trust in how goods are identified, traced, and accounted for throughout their lifetimes.

The Foundation delivered a three-day in-person blockchain onboarding workshop to the Research and Development team at SENAI-SP in Brazil, bringing together software developers, AI researchers, data scientists, and UX professionals. The workshop received an NPS of 70 with zero detractors, reflecting strong reception from a technically demanding audience. Participants identified concrete industrial applications for Cardano, including supply chain traceability, digital certification, carbon credits, and audit systems, with 84% expressing interest in an industrial pilot as the next step. Feedback from two consecutive cohorts will directly inform the structure of future editions.

The Community Team launched a revamped, App Store-style experience on cardano.org, making it easier to discover what can be built and done on Cardano. The rebuilt apps page is a curated experience covering sending, swapping, voting, building, and playing, all reflecting what is working on Cardano today.

Let's Talk Cardano brought two conversations to the community in May. Christian Rau, SVP at Mastercard, joined to discuss how Mastercard is integrating blockchain and stablecoins into global payments, covering settlement innovation, crypto cards, and the emerging space of agentic commerce.

Bartek Czerwinski, COO of BikeID, walked through how on-chain bicycle registration creates verifiable proof of ownership and supports theft deterrence at scale, showing what digital identity looks like applied to a specific, everyday problem.

Episode 5 of Community Holds the Mic went live from the Cardano Summit 2025 in Berlin, passing the mic to the builders, creators, and innovators shaping the ecosystem to answer one question: what are you building on Cardano?

The Foundation shares frequent updates on LinkedIn and X, and the Simply Blockchain newsletter offers a monthly roundup of key Cardano events and developments.