Week 34 · 2026

Highlights

cardano-init shipped its first releases — and picked its shape

Last week doubled the toolbox and wired it together; this week turned that into a released product and made some hard calls about what it is.

• First tagged releases: v0.2.0 (#72) and v0.2.1 (#78). Both go out through the cargo-dist pipeline, with the release-notes machinery built to match: a git-cliff config that turns Conventional Commits into a Keep-a-Changelog file grouped into Features / Fixes / Docs, with contributor attribution and compare links (#71), v-prefixed headings and a documented PR-based release flow that respects branch protection (#73), and a follow-up that pins the GitHub remote so by @handle attribution stops silently vanishing when no token is present (#79).
• Dropped the web builder surface (#68). The CLI is now the only surface — the local server, the planned hosted page, and the WASM live-preview are all cut as a product direction. One clear thing done well beats a split roadmap.
• cardano-init add / remove (#59). You can now edit an existing project's composition after generation — swap Aiken→Plinth, add off-chain, add infra, drop a role — with auto git-init so those commands work out of the box. Selection is reconstructed from the tree (structure is the source of truth), not from a manifest.
• Network stopped being a scaffold-time choice (#60). Every project generates for preview; switching is a one-line CARDANO_NETWORK edit in .env, which every component already reads at runtime. This also fixes the infra scripts silently overwriting a hand-edited .env on every just dev.

A steady stream of hardening and polish followed: the doctor now detects real Tx3 projects despite their legitimate @meshsdk dependency and stopped emitting a spurious git note (#74); nix_packages order is canonicalized so add and a fresh scaffold produce byte-identical flake.nix (#70, the determinism contract); a missing FromStr for Network that broke the clippy build was added (#64); a docs pass corrected drift where shipped features were still tagged "(planned)" (#67); the README leads with a demo GIF and a real hook instead of a red warning block (#76); list --table prints a compact tools-by-role matrix (#77); template just output is quieted behind per-step banners (#75); and a Devnet Smoke badge closed a CI-badge inconsistency (#62).

First external contributions landed

Chris Gianelloni (wolf31o2, Blink Labs) opened a run of PRs: a new Dingo devnet provider (#84, a digest-pinned single-node Compose devnet with Blockfrost API + faucet), plus a cluster of Yaci/template fixes — constraining the integration-test endpoint (#83), funneling .env updates through a single 0600 file descriptor (#82), and a security fix to stop logging environment-derived values (URLs, network) in generated output (#81). Outside contributors showing up is exactly the signal cardano-init is aiming for.

The tracker itself (D1)

Two updates to devx-updates: the Cardano tooling map now folds in team contacts — per-node GitHub/𝕏 handles plus a normalized teams map with pingable maintainers, since a GitHub @org mention notifies nobody (#27) — and Abid (ChainTask | AdaState) added his signature to the pledge (#28).

The library (D5)

contracts-library (D5) ran hot again — 34 commits — with the config-parameter-management PR (#32) still in flight.

The portal (D4)

Cardano Foundation's Developer Portal (D4) added another 10 commits of onboarding momentum.