The Hydra team kicks off the new year by with a reinvigorated focus on developer experience. Over the coming months we will be working to improve our performance and observability, while addressing any user-submitted bugs and feature requests.
Currently there are a few important high level tasks that Ledger team is focused on:
Continue working on defining Ledger validation rules for CIP-118 - Nested Transactions:
One of the major milestones in the last month was actually getting the CIP merged, which means we were able to solidify the design as well as identify a few new and very important use cases that Nested Transactions will bring to the table.
On the implementation side we've had some very nice progress with full definition of binary format and Haskell representation of a Dijkstra era transaction and its sub-transactions. We've also defined the full Ledger rules structure for Nested Transaction, albeit mostly with placeholder logic for now. Implementation for the logic in those rules is one of the main focus points for the upcoming weeks.
Started working on the first phase of CIP-159 - Account Address Enhancement
This is a very much anticipated CIP, because it will finally allow micropayments in ADA, once released with the Dijkstra era. We have so far defined one of the new fields in the transaction and performed some of the necessary code changes in preparation for this work.
Improvements on how CDDL specification is defined and how conformance testing against it is performed.
We had incredible progress on improving how CDDL is defined. We've performed major refactoring of cuddle, which is the tool that we use for defining CDDL specification. We have designed a very nice interface for writing those definitions that drastically reduces duplication from era to era, thus improving safety of new definitions. Removal of a few bugs in the CDDL specification was a good testament to this effort. Moreover, we added the ability to supply custom value generators, which will allow us to test aspects of CDDL specification that were previously impossible to test due to the limited nature of CDDL expressiveness.
Furthermore, we just released a new tool antigen, which we are in process of integrating into cuddle, which once complete will let us write negative property tests for Ledger decoders. It might not sound like much, but it will in fact protect us from a whole class of deserialization bugs, such as one that happened on mainnet two months ago.
Besides those major points above, since the last update, Ledger team:
UTXO rule and collateral Ptr checkisValid flag in transaction (de)/serializationminFeeA to CoinPerByte and rename minFee parametersApplyTxErrorArbitrary instance for DijkstraBlockBodyAlonzoBBODY to Imp test
This year, the Mithril team continues to prioritize protocol decentralization through the DMQ network, broader protocol adoption, and the introduction of succinct proofs by evolving the STM library with SNARKs.
This week, they focused on implementing the SNARK-friendly STM library, kept developing the non-recursive SNARK circuit MVP within it, and started working on the pre-aggregation SNARK primitives. They also kept working on the prototype of the recursive SNARK circuit.
Additionally, the team prepared for the deployment of the DMQ network by finalizing its infrastructure and node implementation.
Finally, they worked on documenting a proposal to make Mithril and DMQ opt-out features of Cardano, and continued updating the protocol security page.
The Plutus team has finished implementing and costing the Value primitives, as well as completing all other development required for the upcoming intra-era hard fork.
We've recently published a blog post recapping the recent UPLC 2025 event: https://www.iog.io/news/uplc-2025-conference-recap
In collaboration with Koz Ross from MLabs, we've implemented optimized byteStringToInteger and integerToByteString primitives.
Both primitives will now take linear time instead of quadratic time.
These improvements leverage the ghc-bignum library, which was made possible by dropping support for GHC 8.
In parallel, we continue to make progress across several other areas, including the initial work on Plutus V4, ongoing discussions around formally verifying the UPLC inliner in collaboration with Professor Philip Wadler, further optimization of UPLC runtime performance, and continued improvements to the usability of Plinth.
Array constructor for UPLC, which can be accessed in Plutus V4
The SRE team continues work on Cardano environment improvements and general maintenance.
Some notable recent changes, updates or improvements include:
The IOG private mainnet pools were retired this week. The IOG1 public stakepool remains active and forging.
An internal Dijkstra network was spun up for testing of the upcoming intra-era hard fork, followed by Dijkstra hark fork testing.
25.1125.11 and fixed docoptshydra-tools, including support for multiple GitHub
organizations and GitHub app installations.