Cardano Development Update: Plutus and Mithril Drive Smart Contracts and Scaling Upgrades – Can it Propel Price to $0,55?

• The Cardano Plutus team finalized guardrail scripts for Conway governance actions and optimized the PlutusV3 cost model.
• The Mithril team focused on certifying Cardano transactions, scaling proof generation for the mainnet, and enhancing low-latency certification processes.

Last week the Cardano Foundation released a report highlighting the key developments taking place with respect to its core technology as well as smart contracts. The ledger team made significant strides in conformance testing this week, completing tests for the CERT and RATIFY rules and advancing other tests.

These efforts led to improvements in the constraint-generators framework. Additionally, the team addressed the stake pool operator stake distribution calculation for voting by incorporating proposal deposits currently locked in the system.

On the other hand, the Plutus team finalized the development of guardrail scripts for Conway governance actions and refined the PlutusV3 cost model parameters for optimal performance. The team also collaborated with MLabs to implement new bitwise primitives.

Cardano’s developments on the Scaling and Education Front

The Mithril team continued their work on certifying Cardano transactions within Mithril networks. They focused on scaling proof generation for the mainnet, prototyping optimizations, and benchmarking performance improvements.

Progress was made on low-latency certification, including retrieving the chain tip and importing transactions from the Cardano mini-protocol with Pallas. Additionally, a new explorer page was developed to display newly registered and deregistered SPOs for the latest Cardano epochs.

The team also upgraded the testing-sanchonet network following the SanchoNet network respin, created a module for building test transactions, and began removing the deprecated snapshot command from the client CLI.

Work on SanchoNet documentation is ongoing, with builders collaborating with Intersect on the new DRep Pioneer program. This program aims to equip participants with the skills and knowledge to serve as Delegate Representatives (DReps) in Cardano’s proposed governance structure.

The Education team is planning the next Cardano Developer course and making progress on the Mastering Cardano series. They are also preparing an educational video about the constitutional committee in collaboration with the Voltaire tribe, reported the Cardano Foundation.

ADA Price Action

Cardano’s native cryptocurrency ADA has been struggling to stay above $0.50. The ADA price has seen strong selling pressure and is currently trading at a market cap of $16.439 billion, reported Crypto News Flash.

The recent double-digit decline in ADA’s price over the past week is due to reduced demand for the altcoin. On-chain data shows that the daily count of active addresses engaging in transactions involving ADA fell by 17% during this period.

Additionally, new demand for the altcoin plummeted, dropping by 22% over the same timeframe. Last week’s decline in ADA demand mirrors the broader downtrend in the cryptocurrency market, contributing to the coin’s falling prices. The global cryptocurrency market capitalization has decreased by 2% over the past seven days.