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Lower costs. Safer contracts. Better tooling.

Plutus is the execution layer underpinning every Cardano smart contract. Whether developers write in Aiken, Plinth, Plutarch, or another language, the code compiles down to Plutus Core and runs predictably under Cardano’s EUTXO model, where a script's cost and outcome are known before it's submitted. Improving Plutus improves the shared foundation for smart contracts across the Cardano ecosystem.

Specialist Partner

VacuumLabs

VacuumLabs will co-steward Plutus alongside IO. The team brings deep expertise in formal methods, security-critical Haskell engineering, and Cardano infrastructure. The co-venture puts Plutus, a shared public infrastructure, on a multi-team footing. Together, the teams will deliver improvements across efficiency, safety and usability, with milestone-gated funding administered through Intersect.

What Plutus Is

Plutus serves as Cardano's smart contract platform and development ecosystem. At its heart is Untyped Plutus Core (UPLC), the compact language that nodes evaluate during transaction validation. Contracts can be written in Aiken, Plinth, Plutarch and other languages, all of which compile to UPLC. Improvements to Plutus therefore benefit the whole ecosystem, not just one language, framework, or developer community.

Why It Matters

Plutus underpins every smart contract on Cardano - roughly a million scripts run each month. Real-world use continually exposes new needs, bottlenecks, and opportunities for improvement, so platforms like Plutus must keep evolving in response to them. Specifically, lower execution costs keep Cardano competitive; stronger correctness guarantees matter increasingly as node diversity grows; a frictionless toolchain broadens the pool of builders, driving adoption across the ecosystem.

What Plutus Delivers

Plutus delivers the smart contract capabilities Cardano developers need to build practical, trustworthy applications

Improvements to the core language and built-ins reduce script size and execution costs, making more contract patterns economical

Formal specifications, conformance tests, and security review strengthen confidence across implementations

A smoother developer toolchain lowers the barrier to entry, letting more builders ship contracts and bring more applications to Cardano

What’s Live / What’s Next

Where we are

Plutus V3 is live on mainnet. The Van Rossem hard fork, which brings the next round of Plutus performance work, is in its final stages.

What’s next

Cheaper built-ins, better conformance testing, formalized built-in semantics, evaluator and costing audits, and compiler/tooling improvements. Protocol-level features target the Dijkstra hard fork.

Roadmap

Milestone-gated funding through Intersect. Benchmarks and certifier reports published openly.

Now

Plutus V3 live, Van Rossem shipping

Q3 2026

Casing on Data; CIP-0156; evaluator security review and developer experience improvements begin

Q4 2026

CIP-0168; improvements on script preparation time; property-based conformance testing framework; Agda denotations for built-ins begin

Q2 2027

All workstreams delivered