Welcome to Intersect’s update #133, "Finding Limits"
The Musashi Dojo has entered its Fire phase, pushing Leios as hard as it will go on a testnet now bigger than Preview or Preprod. The Parameter Committee has opened Cardano's first public research RFP, asking how low the minimum UTxO cost can safely be set. And Epoch 660 broke a transaction record, which turned out to be some hapless canine meme token project reviving an old faucet to see whether it still could.

Elsewhere, every project funded through the 2026 budget now has an on-chain contract behind it.

Contributors: Ian H, Larisa M, Thomas L, Duncan S, Intersect

Latest on Cardano upgrades

Node Releases

Cardano node 11.1.3 remains the recommended release with SPOs and node operators once again urged to be on version 11.1.2 as minimum. Progress on node version 11.2 continues with a tag on the GitHub releases page expected soon. Node 11.2 will also usher in a public DijkstraNet, allowing ecosystem developers to begin integrating the Dijkstra feature set with their dApps and tooling. Early participation is essential to the progress of hard fork readiness and so the upcoming DijkstraNet is highlighted now for awareness.

Dijkstra updates

The Musashi Dojo, the official linear Leios testnet, entered its third phase this week. Following successful “Earth” and “Water” phases in Q2-3, the “Fire” phase ushers in a phase of “load and stress testing at a global scale”. Carlos Lopez de Lara highlighted the significance of the scale of the testing with the Musashi network currently standing at a size and geographical distribution greater than existing Preview and Preprod networks. The aim of the “fire” phase is to push the network to its limits in order to understand how best to configure the initial parameter settings for Cardano Mainnet. On October 15, the Leios development team held 2 open office sessions in the IOG Discord channel, at 8AM and 6PM UTC, for SPOs and curious community members to tune in from around the world, watch the progress and ask any questions. We look forward to hearing about the findings from these tests in the coming days and weeks. In the meantime, SPOs, dApps, and developers are encouraged to participate in testing on the Musashi network.

Want to get involved?

The Hard Fork Working Group meets every Tuesday and the call is open to anyone. SPO attendance in particular makes the readiness conversation better, because the people being asked to upgrade are in the room when the timeline is set. Join via the Luma calendar.

Governance accessibility

On October 11, DRepTalk announced v1.7.0 and the ability to submit governance actions now available in beta on the Cardano Preprod network. A detailed guide can be found on the DRepTalk help pages.

Constitutional Amendment Portal (CAP) updates

Last week we covered the second draft of CAP-12, the Dijkstra era parameters amendment. The author’s next revision, addressing the remaining review comments, is still to come, and the thread has used the pause well.

The TSC chair has published a side-by-side comparison of CAP-12 against the Parameter Committee’s technical review, showing what has already been absorbed and what is still open, with further commentary promised. A community member raised a question nobody had asked yet: not which parameter switches Linear Leios off, but what it would take to use it. The parameter CAP-12 designates as the off switch sits on the Constitution’s critical list, so flipping it needs the Constitutional Committee, the DReps and the SPOs, plus a 90-day notice that can only be waived for a serious incident. That makes it an orderly shutdown rather than an emergency one, and the comment asks the CAP to say so and to write the fast path for real incidents into the text now. And a CIVICS member has flagged that whether CIP-23 lands in Phase 1 or Phase 2 of Dijkstra directly affects how the old minimum pool cost guardrail should be handled, so that piece may wait on the hard fork working group’s scope decision

Every proposal on the portal got better because someone read it and said what they thought. The CAP-12 fixes that matter most came from a community member who noticed an old rule nobody was looking at, and from a DRep who kept asking how the rules would work in practice. None of them needed special access or a title. You can read any proposal, leave a comment, reply to someone else’s, or submit a proposal or issue statement of your own. You can also join the CAP review call, where the editors go through the live proposals in the open. All of it takes a wallet, which does not need to hold ADA, and a view.

If you have been following along, this is your invitation to stop following and start taking part. Find the portal at https://cap.intersectmbo.org.

Recently closed governance actions

Live governance actions*

*data from 2026-10-17 at 10:10 UTC
** SPO votes on Info Actions are not mandatory, however this action requests SPO input
Follow vote progress with your favorite Cardano explorers:

GovTool | Tempo | Cexplorer | AdaStat | CardanoScan | CGov | Civitas | DRepTalk

Delivery Assurance updates

Intersect-administered projects reported progress this week, while not necessarily milestone completions, they represent significant work towards those milestones.

Se7en Labs - Daedalus wallet

Daedalus wallet version 11.5.0, was released on October 14, incorporating cardano-node 11.1.3. It fixes a Mithril partial-sync issue that could leave gaps in the local blockchain, improves Windows compatibility, and adds native Linux packages. All Daedalus users are recommended to upgrade.

Teragone Factory - Mithril

The Mithril team posts regular updates on X, every 2 weeks, at the end of a development sprint. Recently they shared the addition of the 2027 roadmap to their 2026 roadmap on GitHub with a request for thoughts and feedback.

Administration services updates

This week the Technical Steering Committee’s smart contract for Technical Coordination, Protocol Governance and Technical Review was Funded and it can now be viewed via Intersect’s Smart Contract UI Dashboard.

This is the final Smart contract of 2026, and with this it means every project funded through the 2026 budget cycle has an on-chain smart contract behind it. All are viewable on the Smart Contract UI Dashboard, alongside the treasury dashboard showing what has moved and when.

Intersect has now raised 25 Vendor Smart Contracts worth a total of 204,639,279 ada.

Intersect Knowledge Base tip of the week

Now that all 25 of the 2026 vendor contracts are live on-chain, the Administration Services Hub is the place to understand what you are looking at. It explains how a governance action becomes a Treasury Reserve Smart Contract, how funds move into Project Specific Smart Contracts against milestones, and what the Oversight Committee checks along the way. On-chain smart contract milestones can be monitored via the treasury dashboard while the off-chain contracts, or Statements of Work (SoW) can be found on the Admin Services pages.

Connecting with the community

The TOKEN2049 numbers are in after last week's event. The Cardano Foundation published its recap on October 12: more than 2,000 booth visitors across the two days, over 30 projects presenting, and more than 700 registrations for Node Diversity Day. A team from the Cardano track won the Origins Hackathon outright.

What the hackathon teams actually built was a highlight - CoinGraph took the overall win with verification that happens before an agent moves funds. Other entries explored real world purchases and private funding for autonomous agents. Taken together they are a decent answer to the question of what agentic payments are actually for.

Epoch 660 closed on Sunday, October 11 with a single epoch transaction record of 1,780,896 transactions which generated 337.72k ada in fees. The achievement has been largely attributed to the revival of the Hosky token “doggie bowl”. A faucet-like feature previously ran by the Cardano meme token project which helped set the previous single-epoch transaction record back in 2021. It was revived for a single epoch, epoch 660, with the specific goal of breaking the previous transaction record.

Cexplorer has shipped a revamp, now live on Preview and Preprod and Minswap & FluidTokens have announced they are planning to join forces, bringing decentralized exchange and lending expertise together.

In other news it was announced that sadly the Cardano Card will be discontinued on October 31. The card’s official account confirmed on October 13 that it will function normally until then. The change follows partner Wirex moving away from custodial services. No replacement has been announced.

Midnight has published its roadmap through Q1 2027. Of most direct relevance to Cardano stake pool operators: NIGHT staking and opening block production to Cardano SPOs are both planned for Q1 2027. Q4 plans include staged consensus migration, block production rewards and faster synchronization. These are roadmap targets rather than commitments.

Separately, NIGHT trading access expanded in Japan, with OKJ support scheduled from October 13.

IOG's weekly development report, published October 16, covers ledger work advancing Leios and Plutus V4, Hydra raising its snapshot cap, clearer swaps in Lace, cardano-init documentation from DevX, and a Research session coming on October 22.

Intersect Parameter Committee opens public call for Cardano research

The Parameter Committee has opened what it believes to be the first public request for proposals (RFP) for Cardano research. The call is open to anyone, with applicants invited to propose their approach and price.

The research will explore how far utxoCostPerByte, the parameter that determines the minimum ada required in a UTxO, could safely be reduced under current and planned protocol rules.

The committee is seeking an assessment of:

• The lowest technically and economically sustainable value.
• The risks and trade-offs of reducing it, and the impact of leaving it unchanged.
• Evidence-based recommendations, including any safeguards needed alongside a reduction.

Applications close on November 4. Applicants should provide their research approach and methodology, relevant experience, estimated completion time, and a fixed-price quotation in ada.

Beyond the parameter itself, this is an opportunity to test an open approach to commissioning research. If successful, it could provide a model for future research calls across Cardano.

Apply: Here · Questions and discussion: Cardano Forum

Developer Office Hours, every Friday

Did you know - The Cardano Foundation runs Developer Office Hours every Friday at 14:00 UTC, bringing builders, ecosystem teams and contributors together to walk through projects, tools and infrastructure, and to ask the hard questions.

Friday October 16 featured Adam Cazes from A.D. Labs, who walked through Nexus, the data and transaction API behind GeroWallet, and covered Yaci Store 3.0 in production and live on-chain events over WebSocket.

These sessions deserve more people in the room. Teams put real work into preparing them, and if you build on Cardano and want to understand more about what others are building, this is an hour well spent.

If you can’t make it live, the recordings of all previous sessions are available to watch on YouTube which go up a few days after each session.

See Upcoming sessions: Scheduled Sessions, and if you’d like to suggest a project or find out more please reach out to darlisa.consoni@cardanofoundation.org or @DarlisaGC on X.

Whats on in the next few weeks:

Mon 19 Oct · 13:00 UTC · Cardano Foundation Research Exchange, first session
Wed 21 Oct · stakePoolTargetNum SPO poll (Info Action) closes
Thurs 22 Oct · Intersect DB-Sync Technical Working Group open session
Thurs 22 Oct · Cardano R&D Session | 2 PM UTC
Fri 23 Oct · Developer Office Hours | 2 PM UTC
Thu 29 Oct · 14:00 UTC · CIP-113 roundtable on programmable tokens and regulated assets
Thu 12 to Fri 13 Nov · Node Diversity Workshop, London - Venue now confirmed.

 

 

That’s it for this week’s update. Thank you for reading. To learn more about Intersect’s work, explore the Knowledge Base, which provides detailed information on governance structures, committees, and funding.

Join the conversation on Discord, and follow us on Twitter (X) and LinkedIn to engage with fellow members, working groups, and the broader community. Subscribe to the public Google and Luma calendars.