Input | Output Research invites community feedback on mid-year research progress

Cardano Vision launched in 2025 with the Work Program 2025 (WP25), a five-year research initiative designed to secure Cardano’s long-term leadership in blockchain.

Today, Input | Output Research (IOR) proudly releases draft versions of its WP25 mid-year reports for Fundamental Research and Technology Validation, marking significant progress in Cardano’s evolution as a leading blockchain. IOR now invites feedback from the community through Cardano Forum over a three-week period before final publication.

These reports showcase how IOR’s first principles approach continues to accelerate innovation while maintaining the scientific rigor that defines Cardano’s development philosophy.

Fundamental Research: building tomorrow’s foundations

This Fundamental Research report draft outlines progress across 20 of IOR’s 34 research streams for WP25, addressing scalability, interoperability, governance, privacy, identity, and security through nine thematic research streams.

World’s operating system

World’s operating system (WOS) advances smart contract development and explores location-based services integration, including research on incentivizing geographic diversity among validator nodes.

WOS-4 Decentralized storage has made significant progress in Byzantine-resilient primitives for distributed hash tables (DHTs) and data availability sampling (DAS), exploring innovative proof-of-space and proof-of-stake Sybil defenses while investigating potential DAS-Robust Distributed Arrays (RDA) unification.

WOS-6 Location-based services and smart contracts introduces a groundbreaking mechanism exploring how geographic location can be integrated into blockchain protocols and smart contract execution. This research is detailed in Incentivizing Geographic Diversity for Decentralized Systems (under submission). The team has completed experimental validation and continues working on integrating verified location claims into cryptographic protocols.

Ouroboros Omega

Ouroboros Omega (OO) encompasses multiple breakthrough initiatives.

OO-1V Ouroboros Peras advances Peras with a forthcoming paper, Adaptively Secure Fast Settlement with Dynamic Participation and Self-Healing (under submission), that proves safety, liveness, and self-healing properties, supported by comprehensive engineering reports confirming the feasibility of integration for accelerated settlement.

OO-2 Ouroboros Leios achieved a significant Leios milestone with High-Throughput Permissionless Blockchain Consensus under Realistic Network Assumptions (Crypto '25), establishing throughput scalability foundations, while follow-up research addresses critical concurrency and conflict resolution mechanisms for vertical scalability.

OO-3 Fair transaction processing contributes Universally Composable Transaction Order Fairness (accepted at Asiacrypt '25), focusing on adaptive security for fair transaction processing mechanisms.

OO-5 Multi-resource consensus - Minotaur explores multi-resource consensus innovations, including Ethereum and Bitcoin re-staking capabilities that expand Minotaur’s consensus framework.

OO-6 Proofs of useful work extends Ofelimos, delivering new consensus design methodologies alongside early proof-of-deep-learning results for sustainable consensus approaches.

OO-7 Congestion control produces comprehensive publications addressing congestion fees, space tokenization, and advanced pricing models for predictable transaction fee structures.

Tokenomicon

Tokenomicon (TO) research focuses on sustainable tokenomics design, improving reward sharing models and transaction fee mechanisms to support long-term ecosystem health.

TO-1 Tokenomics design has extended previous work, advancing economic models for Cardano through comprehensive reserve policies and resilience frameworks. The research includes insights from large-scale surveys of 11,000 participants and introduces new frameworks for algorithmic monetary policies.

TO-2 Reward sharing and transaction fees presents innovative pooling mechanisms through a Shapley-value-based scheme that will be detailed in Pool Formation in Oceanic Games (accepted at AFT '25). These mechanisms explore pooling trade-offs and designing targeted incentives for Mithril.

Democracy 4.0

Democracy 4.0 (D4) delivers significant governance innovations.

D4-1 Next-level governance protocols has finalized a UC security framework specifically for layer 2 governance and designed a minimal-footprint protocol featured in Beyond Blockchain Ballots (under submission).

D4-2 Governance incentives contributes Reward Schemes and Committee Sizes in PoS Governance (FC ‘25), providing comprehensive modeling of DRep incentives and exploring participatory budgeting applications for Catalyst.

Internet Hydra-ted

Internet Hydra-ted (IHT) scaling solutions show remarkable progress across multiple fronts.

IHT-1 Hydra tail has developed a complete rollup-style protocol design with security proofs due for completion in 2025.

IHT-2 Inter-head delivers the first UC framework for multiparty state channels, detailed in Universally Composable Treatment of Multi-Party Isomorphic State Channels (under submission), with ongoing work extending channel composition capabilities.

IHT-3 Optimization tools has mapped critical mechanisms including fund rebalancing and routing algorithms, producing a comprehensive roadmap for Hydra enhancements targeted for 2026.

Interchains

Interchains (IC) secure interoperability protocols advance through four key initiatives.

IC-1 State proofs and blockchain bridges delivers Bridge Games (under submission), establishing the first formal bridge security framework, complemented by zero-knowledge advances on efficient Merkle openings (ICCCN '25) and ongoing TEE bridge development.

IC-3 Light client infrastructure introduces Cavefish (under submission), an ultra-efficient light client specifically optimized for UTXO chains.

IC-4.1 DApps tokenomics explores tokenomics for system launches through Airdrop Games (IJCAI '25) and Self-Reinforcing Airdrops (under submission), enriched by behavioral insights from Investors vs Gamblers (CRETE '25).

IC-4.2 Consensus innovation advances Jolteon formal verification, with safety verification complete and liveness proofs underway, while developing comprehensive game-theoretic models of proof-of-stake incentives. In addition, anti-grinding has been thoroughly investigated, resulting in Taming Iterative Grinding Attacks on Blockchain Beacons (accepted at Asiacrypt ‘25). Together, these advances strengthen the theoretical and practical foundations of Cardano’s consensus research.

Core zero-knowledge (ZK) capabilities

ZK-1 Core zero-knowledge capabilities advances foundational UC frameworks through AGATE (CSF '25), which formalizes trusted execution environments, and UC-Secure Zero-Overhead SNARKs (TCC '24), proving Groth16 UC security without efficiency compromise. Applied research improves Mithril through succinct aggregation techniques including BLS signatures and Merkle proofs, while post-quantum ZK efforts have produced a comprehensive survey on lattice-based SNARKs and folding schemes to guide future research directions.

Technology validation: from research to reality

The Technology Validation report details six cutting-edge prototypes that bridge the gap between theoretical research and real-world deployment. Each project represents six to 12 months of intensive work by IOR’s Innovation team, producing reference specifications, functional prototypes, and Cardano improvement proposals (CIPs) ready for ecosystem adoption.

These are working solutions designed to test assumptions, define technical requirements, and prepare technologies for deployment across the Cardano ecosystem.

TV-1: Leios

Leios emerges as the flagship achievement, offering a protocol that can scale Cardano’s transaction throughput up to five times while maintaining the platform’s renowned security guarantees. The team has developed comprehensive simulators, a working prototype, and detailed cost models, with handover to the Input | Output Engineering (IOE) team scheduled for Q3 2025. A draft CIP has been issued.

This advancement represents a fundamental leap in Cardano’s capacity to handle global-scale applications without compromising on decentralization or security.

TV-2: Anti-grinding

Anti-grinding introduces the Ouroboros Phalanx extension, increasing the computational cost of grinding attacks. This enhancement enables faster settlement times while strengthening network security. The CIP Phalanx proposal is currently under community review, demonstrating IOR’s commitment to transparent, collaborative development.

TV-3: Jolteon liveness/fast BFT

Jolteon liveness/fast BFT advances consensus algorithms for partner chains through formal verification of the Jolteon consensus algorithm’s liveness properties. The team has achieved a Technology Readiness Level 4 (TRL4) prototype with substantial progress in formalizing liveness proofs.

TV-4: RSnarks

RSnarks focuses on recursive SNARKs technology, enabling both enhanced privacy and seamless interoperability. The project’s major achievement includes successfully executing a large recursive Halo2-BLS verifier on Cardano’s pre-production environment, splitting verification across multiple transactions to demonstrate practical implementation.

This work directly supports IOR’s vision of a trustless zk-bridge between Cardano and partner chains, expanding the ecosystem’s reach while maintaining robust security standards.

TV-5: Proof of restake/Minotaur

Proof of restake/Minotaur has reached Science Readiness Level 4 (SRL4) with a functional Rust library, comprehensive specifications, and detailed simulations of committee selection processes. The project achieved successful integration into Jolteon’s simulation environment, validating the feasibility of securing new blockchains by re-staking ada and eth. This breakthrough offers a practical pathway for launching new proof-of-stake networks while leveraging existing stake security.

The prototyping work has also identified critical protocol enhancement opportunities, most notably the certification of Cardano block headers through Mithril. This advancement would enable compact, time-bound proofs for light clients, bridges, and layer 2 applications, bringing Cardano closer to feature parity with other leading blockchain ecosystems.

TV-6 Light clients/Cavefish

Light clients/Cavefish, in its inception phase, develops a secure, resource-efficient way to interact with Cardano without running a full node – benefiting mobile users and DApp developers. Current work includes early planning, reviewing IOG’s research, and addressing skills gaps.

TV-7: Committee proofs (proposed)

The proposed Committee proofs stream explores how to enable secure cross-chain bridges between Cardano and partner chains like Midnight, using SNARKs to efficiently verify committee rotations.

Communication and dissemination

IOR’s evidence-based methodology follows a Software Readiness Level (SRL) framework, guiding research from early exploration (SRL 1-2) through technology validation (SRL 3-5) to targeted implementation (SRL 5+). This structured approach ensures every innovation is scientifically sound and commercially relevant.

IOR centers innovation on transparency, ensuring smooth transitions, accelerating adoption, and minimizing knowledge loss.

IOR uses multi-channel dissemination:

• GitHub for code
• IO Library for papers,
• IO blog posts for context,
• Discord and Cardano Forum for interaction,
• monthly R&D sessions for live engagement, and
• social media for milestone amplification.

This builds an evidence-based innovation culture, reinforcing IO’s reputation for openness and research impact.

Best practices vary by stream. Leios features open repositories, monthly live updates, weekly progress reports, and technical explainers. Whereas RSNARKs was open-sourced post-prototyping with explanatory posts. IOR consistently balances visibility with quality while engaging the community at key stages of the lifecycle.

Building the future together

The draft Fundamental Research and Technology Validation reports are now available on Cardano Forum for community review and discussion. The feedback period runs for three weeks, with final versions incorporating community insights to be published thereafter.

This collaborative approach continues IOR’s tradition of transparent, community-driven development that has positioned Cardano as the blockchain built on scientific foundations and powered by collective innovation.