What’s Next for Cardano? Input | Output Outlines 2025 Roadmap with Community at the Forefront

• Cardano has disclosed in its roadmap that the upcoming developments will focus on scalability, usability, utility, interoperability, and extension.
• Cardano would integrate scalability solutions to facilitate high transaction volumes while accommodating billions of users. 

In a recent blog post, Cardano’s Chief Product Officer Mike Ward disclosed the submission of a proposal by Input | Output (IO) for appraisal and review. According to him, the current roadmap focuses on three pillars: scalability, usability and utility, and interoperability and extensibility.

Per the post, this seeks to address the demand of its growing user base and subsequently enhance the ability of Cardano to support Decentralized Applications (DApps).

Source: Charles Hoskinson

Scalability

According to the post, Cardano seeks to scale its network to accommodate billions of users worldwide by 2030. Meanwhile, this would demand the maintenance of decentralization, affordability, and security while removing barriers to entry.

The integrated advanced scaling solutions would also ensure that high transaction volumes are enabled with the multi-faceted approach to achieve scalability. Fascinatingly, these would be done through multiple technologies, including Layer 2 Hydra state channels, Layer 2 rollups (Zero-Knowledge (ZK) and optimistic), Ouroboros Leios and Peras, Mithril certificates, Catalyst voting platform, etc. As indicated in an earlier discussion, the Ouroboros Leio upgrade was done last year to enable transaction efficiency and Scalability.

Ward also explains that Cardano could preserve its network’s integrity by prioritizing decentralization and scalability. Fascinatingly, this was also highlighted at the Cardano summit organized in Argentina last year, as indicated in our earlier discussion.

Usability and utility

According to the Chief Product Offer, Cardano seeks to address usability challenges as part of its commitment to decentralization without compromising its foundational value. To achieve this vision, the team would rely on support for key functionalities – identity, privacy, and regulatory compliance.

Additionally, the usability and utility pillar would be supported by key initiatives, including Improving developer productivity, Enabling identity with Hyperledger Identus, Enhancing privacy through Midnight, and Simplifying transactions via Babel fees.

Cardano’s commitment to usability and utility will ensure a robust, accessible platform that empowers developers to build innovative, cross-chain applications and high-assurance smart contracts while fostering a great user experience.

Interoperability and Extensibility

Another area of importance would be unlocking the potential for interoperability. According to the report, this will fix the security challenges such as attacks and wrapped tokens faced by the traditional bridges.

Meanwhile, the effort to achieve this would require layered node architecture with microservices, multi-resource consensus with Minotaur, extensibility through service layers, cross-chain transactions via Hybrid DApps, and Cardano as the smart contract layer for Bitcoin.

One of the key plans for 2025 is to merge the mining to ensure that Bitcoin users interact with Decentralized Finance on Cardano and execute private transactions using Midnight. As outlined in our previous blog post, the testnet launch for the Midnight was unveiled in October 2024.

IO’s outlook for Cardano’s roadmap emphasizes a bold and forward-thinking approach to blockchain innovation, prioritizing scalability, user accessibility, and seamless interoperability. By driving progress in these key areas, Cardano can continue to build on its strong foundation for sophisticated decentralized applications, enable secure interactions across different blockchain networks, and foster widespread adoption across many sectors.