ICYMI: new post this week in on our Substack newsletter, The Ecosystem Operator. Stop treating AI like a new technology and start treating it like a brand new ecology. Not an interface, but an entire environment that completely rewires human behaviour. @benohanlon has written a cracking piece. Grab a cuppa and dive in. Proper first-principles thinking. 🧠☕️

"AI, like money before it, is a coordination technology that reorganises society. But it sits a layer deeper. Money captured exchange, and through it, governance. AI reaches the layer beneath both: cognition, where belief itself is made. Capture that and everything built on belief comes with it, money included." A weighty yet super interesting new Substack post from @benohanlon and the prelude to something of a magnum opus. Worth 15 mins of your time over a good coffee. ☕️ ecosystemoperator.substack.c…

So incredibly sad to read this news. A wonderful musician who I’ve listened to and admired for decades. Fare thee well sir and rest in peace.

🚨 BREAKING: 100+ companies just backed Open USD, a dollar stablecoin run by a new independent company, Open Standard. Zach Abrams is interim CEO. Five-minute reaction (and personal views only.) The instinct is to count the logos when you see a lot of them. The design choices matter much more. - No mint or redemption fees by default - No arbitrary caps when you scale from $10k to $10m - Reserve yield shared by default (issuers used to keep it) This is clearly about scale, and going after the larger, industrial-grade payments volume. Open Standard runs like a financial market infrastructure. It remids me more of things like SWIFT, the card networks, the clearing houses. Owned broadly, governed by a board, a little "boring" on purpose. --- Credible neutrality is the whole game. One company's coin is a product. A coin a hundred competitors agree to share becomes a standard. The cap tables of SWIFT and the early clearing houses were the incumbents of their day in one room. This rhymes. Look at the breadth too. Banks, card networks, crypto natives, fintechs, big tech, on one coin. A global PSP, a community bank, an international long-tail player. Everyone finds an animal in the picture that looks like them. That breadth is the ultra significant bit. --- For stablecoins to get beyond their current use cases, we needed something that got rid of the penalties for scale (like mint burn fees) and could handle massive volume. Today's stablecoin use cases are a rounding error against what's coming. with ~$300B in circulation. SWIFT instructs an average of 5 to 6 trillions a day. The card networks settle trillions. Capital markets, QUADRILLIONS. The prize is moving those flows on-chain, 24/7, with the settlement guarantees regulated money actually needs. If you build payments, capital markets or treasury, this is the rails question of the decade. Read the design choices first. The logo wall is the easy story.

Hey Cardano! Want to see Ouroboros-Leios working? We have a demo below. This is real, running code — not theory. Watch the full demo here 👇 #Cardano #Leios #Ouroboros #Treasury

NEWS: Cardano DeFi just got the pricing layer it's been waiting for. Pyth Pro is live on @Cardano 🧵

"Indigo Protocol is the first Pyth Pro user on Cardano." 😎 We are looking forward to utilizing Pyth feeds for iAssets, and the Indigo Limitless forex suite coming in V3. Thanks to @PythNetwork, @Cardano_CF and @IntersectMBO for helping make it possible. 🤝

Impacting people lives? Enterprise adoption? Reaching vision 2030 KPIs? Watch this 30 min video and learn more about 5am.earth & sf-india.in work in India and how an info trust layer on Cardano can connect to many Cardano dapps and impact the lives of millions of farmers. nitter.net/Elkconnect_web3/status… Please share feedback and questions

It looks like Consensus Miami (@consensus2026) is going to be an incredible event. To all participants, attendees, and ecosystem members who will be there, including ambassadors, builders, startups, projects, and community members, please make your best effort to represent us well. We trust you!

We appreciate @ada_stat voting YES We are now at ~63% Around ~200M ADA in voting power missing Can the community show they are in power?

There's a Cardano Upgrades proposal live right now that changes how transaction fees work. New fee models for builders. Multi-asset Treasury options. A pure native-asset experience for users. Here's why it matters and why you should vote YES

Following community feedback, we have submitted a revised @CardanoSummit proposal with reduced costs and retained quality. Key changes to note: • This proposal is decoupled from EMURGO’s TOKEN2049 sponsorship proposal. • Budget is reduced by 22% or $550,000 while retaining the tier-one experience to showcase an L1 blockchain like Cardano. • Achieved through reduction from three stages to two which lowers production, tech and onsite logistics costs. • Increased the Cardano Foundation’s estimated internal resource contributions to $380,000 from $250,000 to reduce external vendor costs. This leaner proposal remains focused on delivering impact and growth for Cardano and its builders, with full KPI transparency. If passed, Cardano Summit 2026 will take place 5-6 October in Singapore. Strategically timed alongside TOKEN2049, we will position Cardano and its builders at the center of the world’s most active institutional and blockchain hub with 25,000 people expected in town. All this at a moment when Cardano’s large technical and commercial integrations have reached a pivotal moment for mainstream finance. Discounted tickets for the event will be available for community members based on their on-chain activity, as last year. The community's input has directly shaped this proposal. We look forward to continuing the conversation in two separate AMAs today. Links in the thread below. View and vote on the proposal: cardanoscan.io/govAction/gov…

Will have a Space with Yves from Serviceplan to discuss their marketing proposal in detail on Thursday

IO delivered a great tool. You can automatically prove the correctness of a Cardano smart contract.

Tomorrow we're hosting an X Space with the leads for IO's Cardano Performance 2026 proposals. Sharan Koneira (@sharan_konerira) - ​L2 Scalability ​Carlos Lopez De Lara (@carloslodelar) - Consensus Join the conversation! 4pm BST Wednesday 29 April: nitter.net/i/spaces/1wxWjanVyznJQ…

Vote for Pebble + Gerolamo!! Super important for Node Diversity, this is the proposal that brings Node Diversity to the browser. Two days left!! Supported by @IOHK_Charles 👏

Wrote a new piece. This one names what we're building and why @pogun_io DeFi got access right — instant, permissionless, global. But the lending side still has no concept of time. no terms. no maturities. default means a price moved, not a payment was missed. @reidlikeabook @PinkBrains_io @meraboraalba have all been circling the same gap from different angles. this is where i landed. nitter.net/omerh_/status/20476833…

We have big news to share: Today the x402 foundation has officially merged the Pull Request to add a Cardano Specification of x402 into the repository. This means Cardano is now officially an x402 chain. And even better: They have also accepted the Masumi Smart Contract and potentially other Smart Contracts as an optional addition to the standard. This now makes x402 on Cardano more powerful than x402 on most other chains because it supports: 1) Identity 2) Refunds & Disputes 3) Decision Logging 4) Registry and more. We want to give a big shoutout to Fabian from the Cardano Foundation who has spearheaded this 6+ month effort the whole way, improving the Pull Request & talking to Coinbase and the x402 Foundation. Additionally we want to shoutout Karsten Siebert who has built the first x402 integration on Cardano and was vital in the discussions around the standard.