Cardano Foundation Monthly Update: October 2026

In October, Cardano made its biggest appearance so far at TOKEN2049 in Singapore. The network’s programmable token standard went live on mainnet during the event, and Veridian, the Cardano Foundation’s digital identity platform, became an independent company. That same week, Fireblocks confirmed it will soon offer custody for Cardano native tokens, a step institutions need before tokenized assets can scale.

Away from Singapore, the Cardano Academy introduced a professional-level certification and brought Cardano into university classrooms in California and Cyprus. Governance work moved forward as well, with the application for a .ada internet domain advancing to its next phase of review.

Making the case for verifiable records

In a Forbes Technology Council column published on 29 October, Cardano Foundation CEO Frederik Gregaard wrote that blockchain's greatest value lies beneath the tokens. He describes it as better bookkeeping, with records that are hard to alter and a shared history that each party can check. This ties the technology to accounting and audit problems enterprises already face.

Gregaard expanded on this idea in an interview with Rüdiger Schmidt-Sodingen for OPINOMIC AG, distributed with Finanz und Wirtschaft, explaining that independent verification grows in value as artificial intelligence (AI) makes claims cheaper to produce. The Foundation applies that principle to its own books: through Reeve, its financial data integrity platform, it published its 2025 financial statements on-chain with an attestation from Grant Thornton Switzerland/Liechtenstein, so outside parties can verify the figures.

Meanwhile in Brazil, Petrobras is using Cardano to turn sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) claims into verifiable records. In a research project with the Foundation and Ledger Labs at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, each verified SAF certificate becomes a token carrying metadata aligned with the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA). Once an airline or passenger redeems a token, it is retired on-chain, so each environmental attribute can be claimed only once. Rafael Fraga, Latin America (LATAM) Business Development Lead for the Foundation, discussed the project on CNN Brasil alongside Marcelo A. F. Curi, Blockchain Specialist and Implementation Champion at Petrobras.

Still in October, Trivolve Tech, a product studio building custom blockchain and AI solutions, submitted a treasury withdrawal to build and deploy its Police Force Management System (PFMS) on Cardano. The system already helps police in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, track criminal evidence on Cardano by hashing scans and lab results on active cases on-chain, so tampering becomes visible against a public, verifiable record. If delegated representatives (DReps) approve the withdrawal, funds will be released only as each milestone is delivered and verified.

Bringing regulated assets onto mainnet

Financial assets carry rules most holders rarely see, from who may own a bond to when a share can change hands. At TOKEN2049, CIP-0113, the Cardano Improvement Proposal (CIP) that defines Cardano’s programmable token standard, went live on mainnet, moving those rules into the token itself. A bank issuing a tokenized bond, for example, can limit holders to verified investors in approved jurisdictions, and the ledger rejects any transfer to an unauthorized address. The tokens remain native Cardano assets, and the upgrade required no hard fork.

The Capital Markets and Technology Association (CMTA), which develops standards for tokenized securities, recognized the CIP-0113 Programmable Asset Tokens CMTA Profile as equivalent to its CMTAT token framework. Companies can now issue ledger-based securities on Cardano that qualify for the CMTA Tokenized Shares certification scheme, widening the set of networks open to issuers. The Foundation has since joined CMTA as a member to help advance standards for tokenized capital markets.

The first asset tokenized under the standard came from Veridian, the digital identity platform the Foundation developed. Veridian became an independent company under CEO Thomas A. Mayfield, and its shares are tokenized using CIP-0113. Its technology lets governments, organizations, and individuals prove who sits on the other side of a digital interaction, and what they are authorized to do, without a central database that could be breached or surveilled.

The Veridian Wallet is live on iOS and Android. Masumi, an agent network built on Cardano, already uses Veridian to give AI agents an identity that counterparties can check before a payment.

“Spinning it out gives Veridian the independence to move at the speed its market demands,” said Gregaard, who chairs the new company.

Custody was a separate topic at the Cardano booth, where Gregaard and Stephen Richardson of Fireblocks, a digital asset custody platform, discussed upcoming Fireblocks support for Cardano native tokens, expected in March. Institutions need that level of custody before tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) can scale.

Equipping developers and their coding agents

The State of the Cardano Developer Ecosystem Survey opened for responses. Last year, 109 developers took part, and this year’s answers, which take about 15 minutes, will help decide where Cardano developer tooling goes next.

Developer work in October moved in step with the token standard. In the Java ecosystem, Cardano Client Lib 0.8.0-pre7 introduced support for programmable tokens and more flexible transaction workflows through QuickTx, TxPlan, and TxFlow. It also added a new backend integration with Nexus, a team helping the Foundation integrate Ouroboros Leios, a protocol upgrade designed to increase Cardano’s transaction throughput. Yaci Store 2.0.7 and 3.0.0-beta5 resolved a critical mainnet synchronization and data integrity issue and shipped repair scripts for affected databases.

Further along the Java roadmap, JuLC 0.1.0-pre20 expanded the compiler that turns Java into Untyped Plutus Core (UPLC), the language used to execute smart contracts on Cardano. Yano 0.1.0-pre19 brought Conway ledger rules to the Java-based Cardano data node, along with conformance tests that confirm it stays consistent with other Cardano node implementations, and ZeroJ 0.1.0-pre13 introduced privacy primitives such as Pedersen commitments. Smaller releases of Yaci and Yano-X rounded out the month, giving Java developers more room to build for regulated assets and privacy in a language they already know.

Exchanges gained support too. Cardano Rosetta Java v2.4.0, which exchanges use to integrate Cardano through the Rosetta application programming interface (API) standard, added initial CIP-0113 support for smart-wallet addresses and stopped reporting zero-value script withdrawals as rewards, although programmable token transfers are not yet supported.

On the finance side, Reeve v1.8.0 added secure NetSuite settings per organization and bulk publishing of funding events, giving organizations finer control over the financial data they publish on-chain.

Builders working with AI agents gained ground as well. The Cardano developer portal now brings together software development kits (SDKs) in seven languages, a local devnet that starts with one command, Cardano context for coding agents, and agentic commerce payments through x402.

Behind those payments, the Foundation built x402 facilitator components in TypeScript and Python with automated testing pipelines. x402 standardizes how a server requests payment for what it serves, so an API or an AI agent can charge per use without sign-ups or subscriptions. Work on Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) strengthened the security of Cardano’s cross-chain connections, lowered verification costs, and made updates and recovery more reliable.

Developer Office Hours ran four sessions in October. Giovanni Gargiulo, Senior Blockchain Architect at the Foundation, presented cardano-dev-skills, an open-source project that grounds AI coding agents in vetted Cardano documentation so they stop suggesting outdated libraries and syntax. In a second session, he introduced uplc.link, which links declared source code to deployed on-chain bytecode so users and auditors can confirm a contract matches its published source.

The Hydra team then ran a technical workshop on Hydra, a Layer 2 scaling solution that settles only final results on Cardano, enabling sub-second finality and zero fees. Thomas Kammerlocher, Head of Solutions Engineering at the Foundation, closed out the series with x402, joined by the Masumi team.

Opening classrooms and research to the community

The Cardano Academy introduced the Cardano Blockchain Certified Professional (CBCP) exam, giving Cardano a professional-level certification. It refreshed the Cardano Blockchain Certified Associate (CBCA) course for 2026 as well, covering blockchain fundamentals and Cardano’s architecture in under four hours, updated for CIP-1694 and the Conway era.

The Academy began a multi-year education and entrepreneurship partnership with the Venture Accelerator at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Anderson School of Management, where teams in the first session designed and pitched a Web3 business. Cardano content is set to enter the UCLA curriculum in 2027.

At the University of Nicosia, the Foundation joined the free online Blockchain and Digital Assets course as an academic content contributor, with John Greene, Technical Writer at the Foundation, and Patrick Tobler of Masumi and NMKR leading guest sessions. The Foundation is sponsoring 25 places in the course’s Advanced Track, putting its deepest tier within reach of learners who could not otherwise afford it.

Research reached new audiences as well. Manvir Schneider of the Foundation and Paolo Penna of Input Output presented a framework at the Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT) 2026 conference that estimates how much reserve a proof-of-stake network needs to stay secure as token price and demand shift, showing that reserve size alone offers no guarantee of security.

On 19 October, the Foundation launched the Cardano Research Exchange, a series of live sessions where researchers share ongoing work from across Cardano and the community helps shape what gets explored next. Schneider opened the series with Juan Ignacio Beccuti Vázquez, Researcher in Economics and Governance, giving an overview of the Foundation’s research initiatives.

The Ambassador Program onboarded five new Ambassadors on 23 October, and three Ambassadors supported the Cardano booth at TOKEN2049 through the Ambassador Bounty Program. The Monthly Ambassador Call featured Damien Czapla and Matthias Benkort of Pragma, who presented Amaru, an open-source, block-producing Cardano node written in Rust that uses about a tenth of the memory of the Haskell node, lowering the hardware bar for running one. Pedro Lucas presented 45B, a multilingual Web3 education and consulting platform that helps small and medium businesses adopt Web3 through a three-week modular course.

Weighing treasury decisions and policy

The Foundation’s application for a .ada domain advanced to the next phase of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) Program. The application follows a governance action that passed with about 75% community support. If approved, .ada would place Cardano in the global internet address system alongside .com and .org.

A new framework for allocating Cardano’s 2027 treasury opened for community feedback on DRepTalk, with input sought on how to structure the Net Change Limit. A draft proposal for Cardano Global Events 2027 went to the community at the same time, aiming for a unified Cardano presence at 12 conferences in 12 cities, with side events, hackathons, and paid travel for builders.

The DRep Delegation Program Report went live, tracking the Foundation’s delegation of 360 million ada to 18 community DReps, whom the Foundation does not instruct how to vote. As of the 16 September snapshot, vote participation across the program reached 74%, and on average 53% of votes included a rationale, a sign that delegated stake is bringing more voices into Cardano governance.

On regulation, the Foundation responded to the European Commission’s public consultation reviewing the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) Regulation, calling for greater regulatory clarity and for improvements within the existing framework.

In the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) classified ada as a digital commodity earlier this year, though only in the explanation of its new crypto rules. The Foundation co-signed a letter with Stellar, Hedera, Aptos Labs, Ava Labs, and Chainlink asking the SEC to write that classification into the rules themselves.

Taking the stage from Singapore to Geneva

TOKEN2049 Singapore on 7-8 October marked Cardano’s biggest presence at the event so far. Over two days, more than 2,000 people visited the Cardano booth, where more than 30 ecosystem speakers took the stage. Gregaard joined David Wachsman, CEO of Wachsman, for a fireside chat on starting with full transparency on a public blockchain and layering privacy on top, and Chief Financial Officer Stephen Wood showed how Reeve put an auditor’s attestation of the Foundation’s financials on-chain.

On the first evening, the Foundation and Draper Dragon co-presented the Rooftop UTXO Pitch Night at Marina Bay Sands. More than 400 attendees and over 90 investors watched nine startups building across Cardano, Bitcoin, and the wider unspent transaction output (UTXO) ecosystem compete for up to US$500,000: Veridian, AllScale, Toto Finance, Kenomic, Spout Finance, Strike Finance, Sundial Protocol, Masumi, and riverArk. The partnership with Draper Dragon extends well past one night through the US$80 million Orion Fund, which backs builders across Cardano.

At the TOKEN2049 Origins Hackathon, 130 of the 200 participating developers chose the Cardano track from five blockchains on offer, with 36 hours to build AI agents that handle payments and prove their work. Two of the top five projects came from the track, including overall winner CoinGraph, which returns a sourced verdict before an AI agent moves money, with agents paying per call on Cardano through x402.

Within the track, Cardano Card took first place by letting agents buy from Amazon through Masumi escrow, zx402 placed second with a private stablecoin funding rail built on zero-knowledge proofs, and Nitrane Systems placed third with Uplift, a 13-agent e-commerce growth team. Hirakumi was named among the event’s best overall projects.

In Munich, the Foundation was a Gold Sponsor of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) Blockchain Conference 26, where the hackathon opened with a €6,000 Cardano track and Fabian Bormann spoke on the Main Stage. At Digital Assets Day, Bormann joined Patricia Albrecht of Solana Germany on the panel “How to Collaborate: Industry x Blockchain Foundations,” moderated by Sebastian Becker of Bundesblock.

On 15 October, Marieke de Ruyter de Wildt, founder and CEO of Open Food Chain, which anchors proof of food sustainability claims on Cardano, led a closed roundtable hosted by the Foundation. Since 27 September, the European Union’s Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition (EmpCo) rules require brands to prove sustainability claims on food, and practitioners from across the supply chain discussed what evidence holds up when a regulator asks for it.

Finally, in Geneva, Chief Operating Officer Andreas Pletscher joined the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Switzerland, Colossus, and Issuance Swiss on the Blockchain for Humanity panel, which looked at recurring funding for refugee assistance as a new approach to impact investing.

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