Hey Cardanians! Welcome aboard the Weekly Cardano Digest #147!

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 Foundation Spins Out Veridian and Tokenises Its Shares

• ⚙️ Node 11.2 and a Public DijkstraNet Set the Hard Fork Path

• 📜 Plutus 1.71.0.0 Ships the Full Plutus V4 Script Context

• Weekly Development Report

• & More!

🆔 Cardano Foundation Spins Out Veridian and Tokenises Its Shares

The Cardano Foundation has spun out Veridian, its digital identity platform, as an independent commercial company. Announced on October 8 at TOKEN2049 in Singapore, the move follows three years of development inside the Foundation. Thomas A. Mayfield, previously the Foundation's head of decentralized trust and identity, takes over as CEO, with Foundation CEO Frederik Gregaard as board chair and chief legal officer Nicolas Jacquemart also joining the board.

Veridian issues verifiable credentials for individuals, organisations and AI agents, built on the open KERI and ACDC standards so credentials can be verified and revoked in real time without a central database to query or to breach. The company says it has aligned its operations with all 142 requirements in Utah's State-Endorsed Digital Identity guide, and the Veridian Wallet already ships on iOS and Android. US consumers lost $27.3 billion to identity fraud in 2025, which is the problem it is pricing itself against.

The financing structure is the part worth pausing on. Veridian's shares were issued on-chain as the first asset under CIP-0113, one day after the programmable token standard went live on mainnet, as ledger-based securities under Switzerland's DLT regulations. A standard shipping on Wednesday and carrying a real company's equity on Thursday is a faster path from specification to production than this ecosystem usually gets. The 2027 roadmap targets US government work, European enterprise, Asia-Pacific issuers and identity tooling for AI agents.

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⚙️ Node 11.2 and a Public DijkstraNet Set the Hard Fork Path

Intersect's weekly update has laid out the sequence that leads to the Dijkstra hard fork. Node 11.2 is the next major milestone: it will carry the full Dijkstra feature set — excluding Leios — and launch a public DijkstraNet for dApp and tooling teams to test against. Node 11.3 is then planned to merge the Dijkstra and linear Leios work into a hard fork release candidate, with Preview and Preprod testnet forks following DijkstraNet's launch.

There is a less comfortable number sitting next to that roadmap. Three weeks after release, roughly 30% of block production in epoch 660 still came from nodes older than 11.1.2. Intersect continues to press SPOs to upgrade, and has now shipped 11.1.3 to fix a minor IPv4 address decoding bug, making 11.1.3 the recommended version with 11.1.2 as the hard minimum. A hard fork only moves as fast as the operators who have actually installed the release.

On the governance side, CAP-12 — the amendment that writes Dijkstra-era protocol parameters into the Constitution — was revised after community review and a technical review from the Parameter Committee through the TSC. The revisions add a defined minimum pool margin with guardrails, stronger Leios bounds and safeguards, and a mechanism to disable linear Leios if it comes to that. Still open: pledge leverage change frequency, the relationship to CAP-10, and benchmarked values for several placeholders.

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📜 Plutus 1.71.0.0 Ships the Full Plutus V4 Script Context

The weekly development report confirms Plutus 1.71.0.0 is out, carrying the full Plutus V4 script context that will ship in node release 11.2. The release also adds Plutus Core language version 1.2.0 and cost models for keepPolicies and dropPolicies — the primitives behind CIP-0168 and, by extension, behind the programmable token standard that went live on mainnet this week.

Several efficiency changes landed with it. The guardrail script is smaller and cheaper after a switch to BuiltinList and BuiltinPair, built-in type casing is now part of the Plutus Core specification, and property tests were added for the V4 script context helpers. A scope check bug and a list-parsing plugin bug were both fixed. Separately, CIP-0205 proposes removing scope checking for Plutus scripts altogether, and the team is asking for feedback before it goes further.

The developer experience work shipped alongside it is arguably the more useful half. The DAO and settings protocol explorations were merged into contracts-library, bringing three validators and 2,125 lines of Aiken tests, with security fixes for refund double-claims, vote tallying under proposal flooding, and caps on the stake datum's locks list. The onboarding Intermediate track is complete and the Advanced track has opened with a vulnerability-detection lecture. The Cardano developer pledge now has 35 signatories, up from 22.

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