• The Cardano team has made some improvements to its wallet services, smart contracts, and scaling solutions.
• This includes testing the new Ledger hardware wallet firmware, improvising smart contracts capacity, etc.

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The Cardano blockchain continues to make progress with the development team working on new updates around the corner. Cardano’s parent group Input Output Global (IOG) recently released new updates and progress of work for the Cardano network.

The development team at Cardano has started reviewing the ouroboros-network, Cardano-ledger, and Cardano-node repositories for open-source readiness. Ouroborous is a Cardano-based proof-of-stake protocol that improves the security guarantees of proof-of-work at a fraction of the cost. Besides, the ledger team is also working with the Plutus team to build a user-friendly Cardano-ledger-API package.

Over the last week, the Cardano team has made some improvements to its wallet services, smart contracts, and scaling solutions.

Every Friday, we publish our weekly #Cardano development update. So for the lowdown on what IOG’s dev team has been working on last week, head on over and take a look https://t.co/UZEaMastLj

— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) December 16, 2022

Cardano wallets and services

The Daedulus team tested the new Ledger hardware wallet firmware. Additionally, they have also been working on the Lace desktop environment. The team has fixed some issues which surfaced after importing Lace browser components into the Lace desktop app.

The team has announced that the Lace Explorers Beta program was a major success. Thus, Lace is now available for public testing with test tokens. This gives the team a first-hand experience to test the platform before its mainnet deployment.

At the same time, the Adrestia team worked on updating the Cardano wallet to support node v.1.35.4. They are now making some final updates to Cardano-rosetta to prepare it for the next major release.

Cardano smart contracts

Plutus, the dedicated team behind Cardano smart contracts, worked on increasing the script capacity of the Plutus debugger MVP. They also worked on building Marconi indexers in order to address the technical debt.

The Marlowe team worked on altering the stabilization-pool contract such that it doesn’t exceed protocol limits. Besides, the team has planned for Marlowe Runtime scalability testing while fixing an omission in the Marlowe specification.

Scaling

The Cardano team has been working on the much-awaited scalability solution Hydra. The Hydra team is working on completing the ‘Validate coordinated Head protocol against formal model’ initiative which will ensure that the protocol implementation is secure. They are also working on implementing ADR21 which relates to bounded transaction validity.

The Hydra team is close to ending the first phase of Obsidian Systems’ Hydra for Payments project and reviewed and submitted the potential issues. On the other hand, the Mithril team has implemented a workflow that would allow the testing of clients’ binaries produced for multiple platforms such as Windows, macOS, and Linux.

At the same time, the Cardano development team has made some development on the governance front.

The Plutus V2 Cost Model network upgrade went live on the Cardano mainnet on Sept. 27, five days after the Vasil upgrade was triggered.

Every Friday, we publish our weekly #Cardano development update. So for the lowdown on what IOG’s dev team has been working on last week, head on over and take a lookhttps://t.co/udW6gkdFhp

— Input Output (@InputOutputHK) December 9, 2022

The Plutus V2 Cost Model network upgrade, per the Cardano team, increases the operational efficiency of dApps (decentralized applications).

Speaking of Plutus, it is the smart contract platform of the Cardano blockchain that allows for the writing of applications that interact with the blockchain.

Plutus Core is a scripting language used in the Cardano ledger. September’s Vasil upgrade brought about a new version of Plutus Core (Plutus V2), a tuned Plutus interpreter and new cost models for both Plutus V1 and Plutus V2 scripts.

The Cardano network reached the significant milestone of 3,000 Plutus scripts at the start of August and has shown no signs of slowing down since then.

On Sept. 22, the date of the Vasil hard fork, the number of smart contracts or Plutus scripts stood at 3,292. According to the most recent weekly report compiled by Cardano builder IOG, the number of Plutus scripts is 4,347, of which 400 are Plutus V2 scripts.

Currently, 1,151 projects are in various stages of development on the Cardano blockchain. There are also 7.2 million native tokens minted across 66,530 policies. The total number of transactions is now 56.3 million.

Cardano’s decentralization drive

In a thread of tweets shared by crypto researcher Sooraj, Cardano remains at the forefront of research and the development of an objective decentralization measurement framework: the Edinburgh Decentralization Index (EDI).

Currently we have no real benchmarking or Indexes

to assess the degree of #Decentralization of public blockchains

That’s why the #Crypto industry falls for the shiny new chain run by 4 people

Here’s a thread on the Edinburgh Decentralization Index https://t.co/qk5xZFe0gk

— Sooraj (@Soorajksaju2) December 9, 2022

EDI is an index developed by the University of Edinburgh to measure the level of decentralization of public blockchains.

Cardano has made another significant upgrade regarding the limits of memory units, and now its director of architecture spreads the word about it on Twitter

Input Output Hong Kong Twitter account has shared a recent mid-month video update from YouTube, where the director of Cardano architecture, John Alan Woods, spoke about the recent Cardano upgrade and what it is about.

Cardano block size gets bigger

According to Woods, Cardano has increased the limits of its memory units per block for Plutus scripts (Cardano-specific software programs) on Cardano mainnet. Overall, he stated that this year is dedicated to scaling Layer 1 on Cardano mainnet.

Recently, substantial improvements to Cardano block size have been made. The blockchain started off with blocks of 64 Kb, then improved the size to 64 Kb and, finally, the block size was recently increased to 80 kilobytes.

The next series of changes was made to the amount of memory units. Plutus requires both computational resources (CPU units) and memory units.

It started with 10 million units, then this amount was increased to 11.25 million, followed by 12.5 million units. Finally, the number recently increased to 14 million memory units on Plutus. That was a 40% increase in the memory resources for Plutus scripts, as per Woods.

Increasing per-block memory unit limit for Plutus scripts

The most recent improvement, however, has been an increase in limits for memory units in each new block. The previous improvements in memory limits were made per transaction. Both CPU and memory units have limits per block.

Talking about the results of the improvement in layman’s language, John Woods stated that now Plutus developers can not only write scripts that do more but can also put more of those scripts into Cardano blocks that have been made bigger.

The previous increase in the per-block memory unit limit was made on Feb. 14, when the limit was raised from 50 million to 56 million per block. That allowed developers to run up to four Plutus scripts simultaneously on each block.

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