The latest Cardano ($ADA) network statistics have just been released, and they paint a fascinating picture of the platform’s progress.
Input Output Global (IOG), the organization behind Cardano’s research and development, recently shared its weekly development report for the week ending Friday, April 14, 2023. This update covered various aspects, including core technology, wallets and services, smart contracts, Basho scaling, and governance.
In the core technology department, teams focused on node, consensus, and networking improvements. They also worked on benchmarking, profiling the new tracing system, and integrating a Plutus script library into their tooling.
IOG’s light wallet platform, Lace 1.0, was launched on the mainnet on April 11, 2023. The Lace desktop version, DApp store, and other features are in the pipeline. The Lace team is working on an announcement feature for updates within the application and considering new features for the DApp embedded browser.
The Adrestia team completed a round of performance optimization for the Lace BE (cardano-js-sdk) and announced the release of Lace on the mainnet. They are also working on multi-signature features, transaction balancing libraries, and DBLayer refactoring.
The Plutus tools team is working on the correctness test for Marconi indexers and better support for logging in the standalone emulator. The Plutus Core team is implementing sums-of-products to add native support for data types and ensure substantial size improvements for Plutus scripts.
The Marlowe team made updates to the Marlowe Playground and published Marlowe libraries to CHaP. They also renamed marlowe to marlowe-runtime-cli in starter kit videos and examples.
The Hydra team published their monthly report for March and discussed query API requests for the Hydra Voting project. They are working on integrating the Hydra Head protocol specification into the repository and implementing a short-term fix for the rollbacks issue.
The Mithril team is focusing on the migration of aggregator stores to a relational design, implementing the new certifier service of the aggregator, and designing the interface for generic actors.
The governance aspect saw a discussion on CIP-1694, which is a Cardano Improvement Proposal named after the birth year of the French enlightenment thinker Voltaire, and is a key component of Cardano’s next-generation governance. This discussion covered community-driven enhancements to the current governance scheme, the future roles of Delegate Representatives (dReps), the Constitutional Committee, and stake pool operators, and the tooling and governance processes needed for Cardano’s development.
The development report also included an infographic highlighting various Cardano statistics, such as 124 projects launched on Cardano, 8.11 million native tokens created, 7738 Plutus scripts, 1225 projects building on Cardano, and 64.6 million transactions processed on the network.
Earlier this month, Cardano Spot, a community-driven social media network for Cardano, recently shared a Twitter thread discussing CIP-1694.
Cardano Spot explains that CIP-1694 focuses on transitioning power and bootstrapping governance. Under this proposal, the community will be responsible for deciding the direction of protocol development and can potentially change aspects like protocol parameters, ledger rules, or consensus rules.
Cardano Spot states that, currently, governance involves Genesis entities working on protocol development and initiating changes, with Stake Pool Operators (SPOs) needing to accept these changes for a proposal to pass. CIP-1694 introduces two new groups: DReps and the Constitutional Committee. It describes DReps as active representatives to whom $ADA holders can delegate their voting power, ensuring community representation. $ADA holders can delegate to multiple DReps or abstain permanently.
According to Cardano Spot, DRep voting power will be proportional to the $ADA delegated to them, with 1 Lovelace equating to 1 vote. DReps can vote yes, no, or abstain on proposals, and they can even remove or replace the Constitutional Committee through a vote of no-confidence.
Cardano Spot adds that the Constitutional Committee, consisting of members selected through off-chain consensus, will monitor the new power dynamics and facilitate a smooth transition to rule-based mature governance. Committee members will have limited terms and can be removed if necessary.
Finally, the thread highlights that Cardano is among the few blockchain projects working on such a comprehensive governance framework. The CIP is expected to undergo further discussions and changes before it is finalized.
