Cardano Hands Core Development to Outside Teams

Input Output, the company founded by Cardano developer Charles Hoskinson, announced on Friday that it will hand control of the network's core components to independent teams. The transition starts in August 2026 and runs through 2027, coinciding with a hard fork that cuts smart contract execution costs. For a project long associated with development centered on a single company, the move reads as an attempt to prove the opposite.

IOG Hands Over the Core Code

Input Output has built Cardano since the network launched and has handled most engineering decisions ever since. The company is now transferring responsibility for four key areas to outside teams:

• the Haskell node, the network's base client
• the Plutus smart-contract platform
• the Daedalus wallet and the Hydra scaling technology
• developer relations

Each of these tools covers a distinct part of the network's infrastructure. Plutus handles smart-contract logic, Hydra speeds up transactions off the main chain, and Daedalus remains the network's main desktop wallet.

According to the company, this is the next step in decentralization after protocol decisions and network governance already moved to the community. It marks the final piece of Cardano's Voltaire roadmap phase, which since 2024 has gradually shifted authority from Input Output to independent participants across the network. Now the code itself is next in line, not just the rules that govern it.

"I'm extremely proud that we have arrived at the final stage with IO Labs spinning out the Haskell node to community curation and control. Our partners are ready and the ecosystem now has many diverse options."

- Charles Hoskinson, founder of Cardano and CEO of Input Output, from an official IOG statement on July 17, 2026

Who Takes Over Development

Two independent teams will lead parts of the infrastructure. Se7en Labs, an agency with a background in building infrastructure for Solana, and Teragone, a cryptographic research team that has spent several years leading development of Mithril, a stake-based signature protocol that speeds up node synchronization across the Cardano network.

At the same time, at least three independent client implementations (Haskell, Rust and Go) will run in parallel, overseen by community bodies Intersect and Pragma, which will approve formal specifications through member voting. Input Output used to make most of these calls on its own. The multi-client model echoes Ethereum's approach, where different teams running parallel implementations of the same network is traditionally seen as a way to reduce the risk of a single flawed codebase taking the whole chain down.

The Van Rossem Hard Fork Landed the Same Week

IOG's statement came a day before the Van Rossem hard fork activates on July 18 at 21:44 UTC. The upgrade was ratified with 77.63% approval from delegated community representatives during a vote on July 13, a fairly strong consensus by Cardano's standards.

Van Rossem moves the network to Protocol Version 11 and adds new Plutus built-in functions that lower the cost of running smart contracts. The project's new motto is "Built by many, owned by all." The next major milestone on the roadmap is the Leios protocol, meant to boost network throughput, though the company has not given an exact launch date yet.

The Market Reaction Stayed Muted

Following the announcement, ADA rose about 2% to trade near $0.165, putting Cardano's market capitalization at roughly $6 billion. That's still almost 95% below its all-time high of $3.10 set in September 2021.

Total value locked on the network remains at just $70 million, more than 50 times lower than Tron or Solana, where the figure tops $4 billion each. Open interest in ADA futures sits around $193 million, and a long-to-short ratio of 2.84 shows most traders are still betting on a rebound.

Hoskinson acknowledged the network's weak momentum and called the restructuring a necessary, if uncomfortable, growth stage. Earlier this year he warned that deteriorating market conditions would push some Cardano-linked projects to shut down, framing the current overhaul as a logical continuation of that cycle. Input Output will now focus on research and new ventures through IO Labs and IO Ventures, leaving it to the market to judge whether the community can keep building without the company that founded it. Other layer-1 networks that have long promised community-driven development without backing it up with real changes to code governance will be watching the outcome closely.