Hey Cardanians! Welcome aboard the Weekly Cardano Digest #143!

We've filtered through all the noise to distill crucial updates into a breezy, 5-minute read. No need for you to sift through endless info ,we've got you covered. Ready to delve into this week's top Cardano news? Let’s dive in.

Here are the topics of the week:

• 🤖 Cardano Is Now Part of the Official x402 Codebase

• 🍨 SundaeSwap Sets October 1 for Sundae v4 Mainnet

• 📈 Kalshi and Polymarket List ADA Perpetuals

• Weekly Development Report

• & More!

🤖 Cardano Is Now Part of the Official x402 Codebase

 Cardano implementation of x402 was merged into the official x402-foundation/x402 repository (PR #2537), contributed from the Cardano Foundation's GitHub organization by engineers Fabian Bormann and Thomas Kammerlo. The merge ships TypeScript SDK support plus client, server, facilitator and working examples, and it is supported across mainnet, preprod and preview.

x402 is the HTTP-402 payments protocol originally created by Coinbase and stewarded since 2026 by the Linux Foundation's x402 Foundation. It lets applications and AI agents pay each other over standard web requests — the long-dormant "Payment Required" status code becomes a native settlement step, with no accounts, API keys or invoices in between.

Cardano's earlier x402 milestones were a specification merge in April and the Cardano Foundation's membership in July. This one is different in kind: a reference implementation any developer can pull today, which is what an agentic economy actually runs on. Cardanians credited Masumi Network as the pioneers of x402 on Cardano, and the Foundation has already made "build the agentic economy on Cardano with x402" the challenge for its TOKEN2049 hackathon track. Machines paying machines, settled on #Cardano.

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🍨 SundaeSwap Sets October 1 for Sundae v4 Mainnet

Sundae Labs confirmed that Sundae v4 launches on Cardano mainnet on October 1, and put the preview testnet live at app.preview.sundae.fi so users can try the new protocol before it carries real funds.

v4 is a full redesign built around a modular architecture: modular pools that plug into active trading across the protocol, automated routing, concentrated liquidity, multi-asset pools that bundle several assets into a single position, custom vaults and partial fills. Concentrated liquidity is the piece traders will feel first — it lets liquidity providers focus capital in the price ranges where trading actually happens, which means tighter spreads and less slippage for the same amount of TVL.

SundaeSwap was one of the first DEXs to go live on Cardano back in 2022, so this is a mature protocol re-platforming rather than a new entrant. The date is not a coincidence either: October 1 is the same day RealFi brings USDr to mainnet, so Treasury-backed stablecoin liquidity and a more capital-efficient DEX arrive in the same week. If v4 delivers what the testnet shows, it closes most of the feature gap between Cardano's AMMs and the leading DEX designs on other chains — right here on #Cardano.

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📈 Kalshi and Polymarket List ADA Perpetuals

Kalshi, the CFTC-registered prediction market, launched perpetual futures for Cardano, alongside BNB, Worldcoin, Aave and Venice, under its "American Perpetuals" line. The contracts are USD-margined, have no expiration and allow long or short positions, and they bring Kalshi's lineup to Bitcoin plus seventeen altcoin perpetuals available to US traders.

The same day, Polymarket rolled out crypto perpetual trading on its international platform with ADA among the assets available at launch and leverage of up to 20x. ADA rose roughly 10% to $0.222 in the session that followed — the market's way of noting that two of the fastest-growing trading venues in the world had added it within the same 24 hours.

Perpetuals are where most crypto trading volume actually lives, and the US market has been mostly closed to them. Having ADA on a regulated, compliance-first US venue and on a fast-growing global platform at the same time widens the pool of traders who can express a view on Cardano without going offshore. More venues mean deeper liquidity, tighter pricing, and one more place where #Cardano shows up next to the majors rather than in a separate bucket.

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Essential Cardano’s weekly development report