Vision

Cardano envisions a future where it serves as the robust and scalable foundation for a decentralized global economy. This will be achieved by significantly enhancing L1 performance through the Leios protocol and optimizing the current codebase, while simultaneously expanding the capabilities of L2 solutions like Hydra and Midgard. By improving developer experience through enhanced APIs, robust tooling, and a focus on decentralization, Cardano aims to empower developers to build innovative and impactful applications. Furthermore, the expansion of programmable assets, including advanced features like account abstraction and regulated stablecoins, will unlock new possibilities for decentralized finance and beyond. This vision emphasizes a strong commitment to research, community collaboration, and the long-term sustainability of the Cardano ecosystem.

The general themes of the community’s short-term vision, as analyzed through the community roadmap survey, focus on increasing scalability, interoperability, and usability.

Roadmap

Scaling the L1 Engine

L1 performance is crucial for widespread adoption and enabling Cardano to become a central hub for blockchain communication. This will be achieved through a combination of codebase optimization and architectural enhancements to increase parallelization.

Leios

Leios is a groundbreaking innovation designed to significantly enhance Cardano’s scalability and transaction throughput. It introduces a novel approach to block creation, moving away from the traditional sequential model.

• Leios leverages a parallel block creation process. Instead of a single linear chain of blocks, it introduces multiple “input blocks” that are independently created and endorsed by Stake Pool Operators (SPOs). These endorsements are then aggregated into “endorsement blocks,” and finally, a “ranking block” determines the final order and validity of transactions across all input blocks.
• This parallel approach has the potential to dramatically increase transaction throughput while maintaining the security and decentralization of the Cardano blockchain.

The roadmap for 2025 includes several key steps to achieve in preparation for the development and implementation of Leios:

• Develop formal specifications to guide node implementations and ensure correctness.
• Conduct extensive simulations to validate the theoretical design of Leios in real-world network conditions and identify optimal parameters.
• Refactor the Cardano node to facilitate the integration of Leios and ensure smooth and efficient operation.

Optimizations

• Optimize the current codebase and address technical debt to improve performance. This will enable more flexible parameter adjustments by the parameter committee, allowing for increased scalability without requiring a hard fork.

• Enhance Mithril’s decentralization by integrating it more closely with the node and utilizing existing networking layers.

Anti-grinding

• Introduce measures to mitigate CPU-based grinding attacks, improving settlement speed and network security.

LSM Integration

• Reduce memory requirements for nodes by integrating Log-Structured Merge (LSM) trees, initially focusing on the UTxO set.

Incoming Liquidity

• Increasing liquidity from other ecosystems is vital for expanding Cardano’s user base.
  • Utilize zero-knowledge proofs to enable Cardano to serve as a decentralized DeFi layer for Bitcoin.
  • Babel Fees (Validation Zones) facilitate transactions on the L1 for users without initial ADA holdings through a decentralized marketplace that allows partial transactions to be accepted and combined from multiple parties, where a marketplace can arbitrage the value in ADA for a user to get ADA to spend the transaction and have the minimum ADA required without having to purchase ADA first through an exchange.

L2 Expansion

To accommodate increasing transaction volume, Cardano will focus on expanding the capabilities of L2 solutions.

Cardano as a Partner Chain

Enable the creation of independent chains with customizable parameters, leveraging Cardano’s security while offering greater flexibility.

Partner Chain Bridges

Develop a decentralized open standard for seamless value transfer between partner chains.

Hydra

Explore new use cases for Hydra, such as governance tools, and continue to enhance its scalability and performance.

• Build upon the success of Hydra Doom by identifying and developing further use cases that can leverage Hydra’s scalability to benefit the Cardano ecosystem.

• Explore the use of Hydra as a platform for decentralized governance discussions and voting, addressing the challenges of managing large volumes of information on the L1.

Midgard

Midgard is Cardano’s first optimistic rollup framework, leveraging the EUTxO model to achieve permissionless operation, efficient fraud proofs, and censorship resistance, without relying on centralized sequencers or custodial multisigs. This unique design enables high-throughput, low-fee transactions while maintaining Cardano’s robust security and decentralization. By aggregating off-chain transactions into compact representations on-chain, Midgard ensures that increased activity directly benefits Cardano’s L1, enabling a sustainable and innovative ecosystem for decentralized applications.

Finality (Peras)

Peras is an enhancement to the Ouroboros Praos protocol that aims to accelerate transaction settlement times. In the current Praos protocol, new blocks are added probabilistically, and the longest chain of blocks is generally considered the valid one. Peras introduces a novel approach by incorporating a voting mechanism among Stake Pool Operators (SPOs).

SPOs can vote to endorse specific blocks, effectively increasing their weight within the chain. This “voting” mechanism allows for a faster consensus on the most valid chain, leading to quicker transaction finality. Faster transaction finality can significantly improve the user experience and enable more efficient and timely transactions.

Developer/User Experience

Improving developer and user experience is crucial for driving broader adoption.

• Generate libraries in various languages to simplify blockchain interaction for developers.
• Expand RPC capabilities to support queries and transaction building, enabling seamless integration with node services.
• Empower developers to create custom chain indexers for specific needs, such as supporting partner chains.
• Decentralize data API services to reduce reliance on centralized providers and empower SPOs.
• Promote the use of local nodes and develop standards for wallet interaction with full nodes.
• Establish a unified standard for tracing, logging, and monitoring across different node implementations.

Programmable Assets

Expanding the capabilities of programmable assets will unlock new possibilities for decentralized applications.

• Develop frameworks that enable a new class of programmable assets beyond native tokens.
• UTxO intent signatures enhance decentralized exchange interactions by allowing users to signify their intent to spend UTxOs under specific conditions, facilitating swaps while maintaining user ownership of their funds.
• Explore the use of soul-bound tokens for decentralized identity and other applications.
• Implement royalty mechanisms to support creators and incentivize innovation.
• Enable the issuance of regulated stablecoins on Cardano through policy-based mechanisms.

Note: This vision and roadmap represents a high-level overview and will be further refined and iterated upon based on ongoing research, community feedback, and technological advancements. It is based on the results of the TSC survey. The initial author of this roadmap is Sam Leathers, Chair for the Intersect Product Committee.

Diverse Node Implementations

Foster the development of Cardano node implementations in multiple programming languages, enhancing robustness, security, and community participation.