Anastasia Labs

Cardano smart contract development and auditing firm. Specializing in mission-critical security. Developing Midgard L2, the first rollup on Cardano.

[Anastasia Labs @AnastasiaLabs]

https://t.co/lUozGZu6CB

[Phil 🪏 @phil_uplc]

Cardano governance can now govern the dApps built on Cardano.

We just proved something believed to be impossible.

A dApp can tie a smart-contract upgrade or parameter change to a Cardano L1 governance proposal. If that proposal passes and is enacted, the smart contract can verify the result on-chain and unlock exactly what was approved.

The authority can come from Cardano itself not a project admin key, multisig, or trusted oracle.

This opens a new path to decentralized dApp governance:

→ smart-contract upgrades
→ changing dApp parameters
→ treasury actions
→ emergency controls

Cardano governance can now become the authority behind how dApps evolve.

I first presented this design at UPLCfest in “Pushing the Limits of UPLC: Everything is Possible” a keynote about achieving things in Cardano’s execution layer that were considered impossible. It's really satisfying to see this finally validated.

[Phil 🪏 @phil_uplc]

I am extremely grateful to every DRep and ADA holder who voted in support of AlphaGrowth PRIME.

Thank you for choosing the hard path.

The easy path would have been to avoid direct comparison. To find a small, low-competition niche, call a handful of pilots “adoption,” and convince ourselves that Cardano does not need to compete directly with Ethereum, Solana, or the other high-activity networks fighting every day for users, liquidity, developers, integrations, volume, and fees.

You rejected that path.

You chose to bet on Cardano having a fighting chance in DeFi, one of the largest, hardest, and most strategically important markets in this industry.

For years, Cardano did the hard technical work. It built eUTxO, formal methods, secure smart-contract infrastructure, decentralized governance, and more recently, the integrations necessary to connect Cardano to the wider crypto economy.

What Cardano has too often lacked is equally serious market execution: deep liquidity, distribution, business development, institutional DeFi relationships, and a coordinated strategy for turning excellent infrastructure into sustained economic activity.

PRIME our attempt to close that gap.

Franklin D. Roosevelt once said:

“Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further—but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off.”

For years, competition within Cardano has served a purpose. Different teams, protocols, institutions, and visions have challenged one another. That pressure sharpened ideas, exposed weaknesses, and helped produce much of the infrastructure we have today.

But we are now reaching the point of “no further.”

The next great competition is not one Cardano project against another. It is Cardano competing against Ethereum, Solana, and every other high-activity network for users, developers, liquidity, integrations, volume, and market share in DeFi.

Competition within the ecosystem helped get us here. Cooperation within the ecosystem is how we compete from here.

“A horse never runs so fast as when he has other horses to catch up and outpace.”

The horses we need to catch are not one another.

For too long, Cardano has largely been allowed to run at its own pace. We could debate internally, celebrate incremental progress, and avoid the uncomfortable question of whether we were moving quickly enough to compete with the fastest ecosystems in the industry.

That changes when we decide to go toe to toe with Ethereum and Solana in DeFi.

They are the fast horses ahead of us. Catching them will require Cardano to move with a level of urgency, coordination, discipline, and execution that we have rarely been forced to demonstrate collectively.

It will require builders, liquidity providers, DReps, wallets, exchanges, infrastructure teams, institutions, and ecosystem organizations to stop treating one another as the primary competition and begin acting like participants in a shared campaign.

More importantly, you placed us under the kind of external competitive pressure that can force an ecosystem to accelerate.

The race ahead will be unforgiving. Ethereum and Solana will not slow down for us. Their liquidity, users, integrations, and developer ecosystems will not be won through rhetoric or technical superiority alone.

We will have to earn market share through execution.

But that is exactly why this moment matters.

Now the responsibility shifts to those of us involved in the program: enforce the gates, scrutinize every deployment, measure honestly, report transparently, return capital that does not earn its way into the market, and deliver results worthy of the confidence you placed in us.

You chose the path that demands more of us: to compete with the best, move with urgency, and genuinely attempt to change the shape of this market.

Now we have to prove we belong at the front of the race.

[VIA Labs @VIA_Labs]

It's live on testnet today!

Builders can get early access to the codebase to start integrating by chatting with us. We already have a few protocols doing this now.

Finalizing a few audits from @OpenZeppelin and @AnastasiaLabs, then afterwards we're off to mainnet. Weeks. Not months.

[Anastasia Labs @AnastasiaLabs]

See the docs:

https://t.co/0aQsJfk0ek

[Anastasia Labs @AnastasiaLabs]

1/ Lucid Evolution now supports exporting transaction diagrams directly from your transaction builders.

You can see the shape of a transaction instead of mentally unpacking every input, output, datum, redeemer, mint, fee, and script interaction from code.

[Anastasia Labs @AnastasiaLabs]

6/ Transaction diagrams / graphs are here in Lucid Evolution.

Build the tx. Visualize the tx. Understand the tx.

More clarity for Cardano devs, less time staring at invisible complexity.

#Cardano #LucidEvolution #eUTxO

[Liqwid @liqwidfinance]

One detail that became public through the DeFi Liquidity Budget process led by @ElderM and the committee members that we’re especially proud to share:

Liqwid is currently undergoing its third independent smart contract security audit, led by @AnastasiaLabs.

Security has always been foundational to Liqwid’s approach to building on Cardano, and continuing to invest in independent review processes reflects our long-term commitment to protocol resilience, user safety, and responsible DeFi infrastructure.

We’re grateful to the community, reviewers, and ecosystem contributors who continue to push standards higher across Cardano DeFi.

[Anastasia Labs @AnastasiaLabs]

3/ This unlocks cleaner patterns like witness-driven complexity collapse: move the complexity into the witness, then build the exact redeemer once the final context exists.

What are you still hand-rolling?

[Anastasia Labs @AnastasiaLabs]

1/ Advanced Cardano design patterns such as witness driven complexity collapse often rely on constructing redeemers which depend on indices of elements in the script context.

Introducing BuildTxWithRedeemer to Lucid Evolution

[Anastasia Labs @AnastasiaLabs]

2/ Easily construct redeemers which depend on indices of inputs, redeemers or other elements in the script context. You derive them from the final canonical tx context after balancing: inputs, outputs, mint, withdrawals, redeemers.

[Anastasia Labs @AnastasiaLabs]

@cardano_guppy @phil_uplc Treasury proposal is approved but we have not withdrawn the funds. The funds are still sitting at the Intersect smart contract. So no treasury money has been spent on this.

We opted to deliver the best L2 possible before collecting funds from milestones.

[Tim Harrison @timbharrison]

Nice update from Josh on improvements coming soon to Plutus Core. TLDR more expressive smart contracts, lower transaction sizes, lower fees

[Quantumplation | Pi Lanningham @Quantumplation]

No; in practice, based on empirical evidence, we have like 100x headroom, so we're barely even touching this; during the reference scripts attack a year or two ago, the nodes were forced to do 100 times as much work as they usually do, and the network held up just fine.

Also, the one way door is only on the *transaction* limits; I'd suggest we raise block limits, see how it impacts the network under load, then mirror that to transaction limits.

[Anastasia Labs @AnastasiaLabs]

@QuasarSure @_KtorZ_ @EpochsEnd @GovActions @IntersectCIVICS @IntersectMBO @butaneprotocol @cbia_org @IntersectTSC @levvyfinance Ex-unit budget, not financial budget.

[Anastasia Labs @AnastasiaLabs]

@_KtorZ_ @QuasarSure @EpochsEnd @GovActions @IntersectCIVICS @IntersectMBO @butaneprotocol @cbia_org @IntersectTSC @levvyfinance Importantly this doesn’t apply to block ex-unit budget (since that can safely be decreased without potentially causing unsatisfiable contracts so long as it remains above tx ex-unit limits).

[Phil 🪏 @phil_uplc]

There’s been a lot of excitement since the announcement that USDCx is coming to Cardano, but there has also been a ton of misinformation that I would like to address.

Misinformation is prefixed by “>”

> “You won’t be able to directly sell your USDCx on CEXs! You will have to get an Ethereum wallet and have ETH then bridge to your wallet and do a transaction on Ethereum to send it to the CEX.”

This is incorrect. You will not need Metamask or any other self-custody Ethereum wallet to off-ramp. You can directly deposit USDCx into your USDC account on any CEX in a single Cardano transaction via the Cardano xReserve web-app.

> USDCx is a scuffed non-canonical USDC, no one will use it or trust it.

xReserve is a protocol deployed and managed by Circle. To trust USDC, you must trust Circle, and if you trust Circle then you trust xReserve.

> USDCx will not be a Cardano native token, it will be a programmable token with clawbacks; or it will be only issued on side-chains.

USDCx will launch directly on Cardano as a Cardano native token; it is not a programmable token.

USDCx represents a huge step forward for the ecosystem, a huge partnership with Circle.