Over the last week, the teams have been hard at work on the Ardana platform and tools that will benefit the entire Cardano ecosystem.

A new language named Pluto, as well as an eDSL (embedded domain specific language) in Haskell named Plutarch, have been created.

By using either Pluto or Plutarch, developers will be able to write hand-optimized, on-chain code for Cardano. This should greatly reduce script sizes and enable more elaborate functionality than would otherwise be possible using Plutus.

Both tools are still very much in the early stages, but they have been open-sourced and are available in the Plutonomicon, which is a collection of advanced Plutus knowledge and tools.

As a potential alternate approach to Pluto/Plutarch, a tool is also in the works that can take existing Plutus scripts and optimize them by shrinking and removing redundant code.

The frontend team has added Nix for dependency management along with Hercules CI for continuous integration. This should lead to more consistent builds and an overall streamlined delivery pipeline.

Various testing approaches have been investigated and evaluated, including emulator tests, contract model tests, and end-to-end tests using a testnet. Refactoring of the codebase has also been performed in order to aid testability going forward.

An implementation of a distributed map that will be used for governance has been worked on and is going through code review. This will allow votes (among other things) to be stored fully on chain with guarantees of uniqueness and the ability to capture snapshots at any point in time.

Other options to improve the efficiency and security of Cardano smart contracts are being looked into, such as side-chains, zk-SNARKs and smart contract verification tools.