Cardano's Input Output to Hand Core Software to Outside Teams Starting in August

Input Output, the company that has led Cardano's engineering since the network launched, will begin transferring control of its foundational software to external teams in August, according to CoinDesk. The components moving out include the Haskell node that runs the blockchain, the Plutus smart-contract platform, the Hydra scaling system and the Daedalus wallet, with the handover extending through 2027.

Independent groups including Se7en Labs and Teragone will take responsibility for parts of the stack, and Cardano plans to maintain at least three separate node implementations, written in Haskell, Rust and Go, under community oversight and formal specifications. Multiple implementations reduce the risk that a single codebase's bug halts the chain, a resilience property that Bitcoin and Ethereum both pursue.

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson framed the restructuring as the final phase of the network's long-planned move toward self-governance, calling the current declines in activity and token price a necessary part of the transition. Cardano's on-chain value remains small relative to the leaders. The largest chains by total value locked are Ethereum at roughly $40.65 billion and Base at $4.53 billion, according to DeFiLlama, and Cardano does not rank among them.

The move is a test of whether decentralization can be measured rather than asserted. Handing the node's development to multiple independent teams is a concrete, verifiable change, distinct from the many networks that describe themselves as decentralized while a single company controls the software that everyone runs.