Less friction. More shipping.
The Developer Experience initiative delivers seven workstreams. Including a setup CLI, a standardized smart contract library, and a unified Developer HUB to make building on Cardano faster and more accessible. The goal: measurable reductions in onboarding time, improved developer satisfaction scores, and more shipped DApps contributing to Cardano's long-term growth.
Specialist Partner
This initiative aims to improve the developer experience across the entire Cardano ecosystem. Because of that, we'll try to collaborate with as many teams as possible. Including delegate ownership of our new tooling to PRAGMA, collaborating on developer relationships with Intersect, and contributing to improving the Cardano Foundation's Developer Portal.
What Developer Experience Is
The Developer Experience initiative is a six-month program, to overhaul how developers build on Cardano. Led by Robertino Martinez at Input Output, it tackles the ecosystem's most critical pain points: fragmented tooling, poor documentation, and high onboarding friction, through seven coordinated workstreams delivered in collaboration with the Cardano Foundation, Intersect, and TxPipe.
What Developer Experience Delivers
The proposal delivers seven concrete workstreams: a setup CLI to scaffold new projects in minutes, an OpenZeppelin-style smart contract library launching with at least five production-ready contracts, a unified Developer HUB with tailored onboarding paths for EVM and Web2 developers, community bounties for key tooling maintainers, developer outreach and content creation, a controlled hackathon to measure impact, and a reactive workstream to address high-value opportunities as they emerge.
Why It Matters
Developers are the backbone of any blockchain ecosystem. Without them, there are no DApps, no users, and no economic activity. A survey of 109 Cardano developers confirmed that fragmented tooling and poor onboarding are the biggest obstacles to growth, and that these are solvable problems. Fixing them is the single highest-leverage investment Cardano can make, directly feeding into more active users, more transactions, and stronger long-term protocol revenue.
What’s Live / What’s Next
What's live:
The proposal has been formally ratified on-chain, and work has already started as we sign the contracts.
What's next:
We expand the team and keep working on it. We'll deliver community alignment and a CLI prototype first, then the improvements to the Developer Portal and the architecture of the contracts library, and then every other workstream.
Roadmap
Milestone-gated funding through Intersect. Quarterly updates published on the IO Labs blog.
June ‘26
Start the work
July ‘26
Community alignment
Aug. ‘26
Setup CLI/TUI - Specifications + POC
Sept. ‘26
ContractsLibrary - Scope and architecture
Oct.’26
Developer HUB: Improving Developer Portal
Nov. ‘26
Setup CLI/TUI - RC ready.
Hackathon & Community Bounties & Developer Outreach done.
Dec. ‘26
ContractsLibrary - Beta release
Final report delivered