Cardano transfers core engineering to external firms

Input Output Group will transfer control of Cardano’s Haskell node, the Plutus smart-contract platform, the Daedalus wallet and the Hydra scaling tool to external specialist firms beginning in August. The handover will run through 2027, IOG wrote in an announcement Friday.

Selected firms include Se7en Labs, a development agency with Solana infrastructure experience, and Teragone, a cryptographic research team that already leads development of Mithril, Cardano’s stake-based signature protocol. At least three independent node implementations in Haskell, Rust and Go will run in parallel and be overseen by community bodies Intersect and Pragma.

The transfer begins one day before the Van Rossem hard fork, which activates on the Cardano mainnet on July 18 at 21:44 UTC. Delegated community representatives ratified the upgrade on July 13 with 77.63% approval. The hard fork advances Cardano to Protocol Version 11 and adds Plutus built-in functions intended to reduce smart-contract execution costs.

Market data on Friday showed ADA up about 2% to roughly $0.165 and a market capitalization near $6 billion. Open interest in ADA futures was about $193 million and the long-to-short ratio 2.84. Technical indicators reported in market commentary listed the Relative Strength Index at 34, the 50-week exponential moving average below the 200-week average, and the Average Directional Index indicating a strong long-term bearish trend. ADA remains about 95% below its 2021 all-time high.

In the announcement, IOG wrote it will shift its focus to research and new ventures through IO Labs and IO Ventures while leaving day-to-day engineering to the wider Cardano ecosystem. The company described the transfer as the final phase of the Voltaire era, the governance and decentralization period Cardano has followed since 2024.

The project adopted the motto “Built by many, owned by all.” Founder Charles Hoskinson wrote in the announcement, “Our partners are ready, and the ecosystem now has many diverse options.” IOG also posted on social media: “The last stage of the Voltaire era is full decentralization of node and reference blueprint development.”