Founding contributors to Cardano. We're still inventing what's next.
IO Labs is a founding contributor to Cardano. We research consensus protocols, formal verification, and applied cryptography, then turn that research into production software the rest of the ecosystem builds on: nodes, smart contracts, scaling layers, and the products built on top. That work began with Cardano, where we build alongside a growing roster of specialist partners, each focused on the layer where they bring the most expertise. The same approach travels to any hard problem where people need systems they can trust. Open source. Peer-reviewed. Live on mainnet.
Our Mission
We research and build the foundations Cardano needs to last. Secure by design, open by default, useful at global scale.
Input Output builds for:
SECURITY & CORRECTNESS
Rigorous design and formal verification, not assumptions.
SCALABILITY
Infrastructure that supports global adoption without compromise.
RESILIENCE
Long-term sustainability over short-term convenience.
OPENNESS
Code, research, and decisions published in public. Built alongside the Cardano Foundation, Intersect, and specialist partners.
Where IO Labs goes next
The Cardano stack is stronger when more teams own more of it. With a growing bench of partners scaling delivery across every layer, IO Labs is free to do what it does best: invent what comes next. AI-led research, protocol innovation, and new ventures. Some of that work extends Cardano. Some reaches into new domains, wherever our research points.
AI-led research
Where AI and cryptography meet, new questions emerge about what blockchains need to do and what they need to be. We're working on the protocol innovations those questions point to. New papers, new specifications, new infrastructure.
New ventures on Cardano
Products and tools built on top of the chain, extending what Cardano enables for developers, institutions, and users. Same approach that built the chain itself: open source, peer-reviewed, shipped on mainnet.
A focused team
Engineers and researchers working in close coordination with the Cardano Foundation, Intersect, and specialist partners across the stack. A deliberately small, deliberately senior team. Senior enough to set direction across the stack. Small enough to move at the speed of the frontier.
Engineering principles
How we work
Every feature we ship starts with research. IO Labs drives the research-to-production motion that turns those questions into working software. Specialist partners join at every step, each focused on the layer where they bring most expertise. The result: improvements that are correct before they're deployed, not after.
Research
IO Labs researchers explore protocol design, cryptography, and system architecture, working alongside academic partners worldwide. Findings go out as peer-reviewed papers.
Specification
Research gets formalized into technical specifications and protocol definitions that engineering teams implement against.
Implementation
Engineering teams build the protocol in production software: the Cardano node, networking stack, and other core components.
Testing and simulation
Extensive testing, benchmarking, and simulation validate that the implementation is correct and performs under real-world conditions.
Deployment
Features go live through community-governed network upgrades, approved by DReps and coordinated through Intersect. Capability gets added without disrupting the existing network.
Iteration
Feedback from users, builders, and the wider community feeds back into research. The cycle restarts.
Stay connected
Monthly engineering sessions
We run monthly engineering sessions on YouTube. Open to anyone who wants to follow development in real time.
Development updates
Cardano development updates Track what's shipping across Cardano's engineering streams, week by week. Updates cover every active workstream and every contributing team.
CDEC
The Cardano DeFi Ecosystem Consortium (CDEC) coordinates decentralized finance (DeFi) development across the Cardano ecosystem.
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