Cardano, the groundbreaking blockchain platform developed by IO Global (IOG), has released its latest weekly development report, offering a glimpse into the ongoing advancements and enhancements in the project.

The report (which is for the week that ended on March 24) covers various aspects of Cardano’s technology, wallets and services, smart contracts, scaling, and governance. Here’s a breakdown of the key takeaways for Cardano enthusiasts who might not be well-versed in the technical details.

In the core technology area, Cardano’s networking team introduced node v.1.35.6, which implements Dynamic P2P networking on the mainnet. This upgrade allows stake pool operator (SPO) relays to connect automatically, replacing the previous manual configuration process. The ledger team has been working on the upcoming Conway era, expanding the ledger API and incorporating multiple governance features. Additionally, the consensus team has been refining the UTXO-HD prototype and making improvements to the mempool and VRF features.

Regarding wallets and services, the Daedalus team has improved the application’s starting screen to display more accurate sync progress with decimals. The Lace desktop development is ongoing, with enhancements to the DApp Connector’s browser navigation, transaction drawer logic, and minor UI fixes. A simple onboarding mechanism for the local node feature has also been finalized and implemented.

In the smart contracts domain, the Marlowe team has made several improvements to the Marlowe validator and addressed various conditions in the Marlowe semantics validator. They’ve also documented the rationale for allowing multiple outputs to an address and addressed minor issues related to the validator and its specification. Moreover, a transaction detail view has been implemented for Marlowe Explorer, along with a paginated index of all Marlowe contracts.

Focusing on scaling, the Hydra team has been working on hydra-node mainnet compatibility and preparing for the mainnet beta release. The Mithril team, on the other hand, has been migrating the aggregator stores to a relational design and implementing automatic handling of API version switches at era transitions. They’ve also successfully completed tests to create certificates and snapshots on a network running on the Cardano mainnet.

In governance, IOG encourages the community to review and contribute to the updates on CIP-1694, a proposal related to Cardano’s governance model. They’ve also announced a Zoom conversation on March 30th to discuss CIP-1694, future workshops, and the next steps towards the age of Voltaire. Project Catalyst introduced a proposed iteration for the community assessment stage coming into Fund10, with more information to be shared in the upcoming weeks.

The development report also included an infographic highlighting various Cardano statistics, such as 118 projects launched on Cardano, 8.03 million native tokens created, 7489 Plutus scripts, 1215 projects building on Cardano, and 63.5 million transactions processed on the network.