The outcome of this proposal is a 2030 community-driven vision for Cardano, a 2026 proposed roadmap, and the first consolidated product research effort in Cardano. This will be achieved by providing clear paths for the broader Cardano community to participate in the 2030 vision creation process—both by contributing insights as key stakeholders and by enabling the collection of additional input through structured user and customer interviews, along with targeted product research initiatives.

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Key Outcomes and value this proposal will deliver:

• Broad community participation in the first community-driven Cardano vision creation process

• Documented insights from the community shared brain

• Documented insights from key groups (such as SPOs, builders, and businesses in and outside of Cardano and Blockchain)

• Participation in creating and critiquing the first draft proposal for a 2030 Cardano vision

• Creation of the first framework and consolidated data set of insights coming from product research guiding Cardano (and builders on Cardano) on what are the most prominent user needs and the key market opportunities

• Opportunities to access funding to run product research initiatives

• Identify promising focus areas for Cardano to achieve product-market-fit, which can be coordinated with the Technical Steering Committee of Intersect to ultimately identify mission-critical Cardano feature sets

Attract New Users

OpenEden’s launched Bills Rewards program is set to benefit Cardano by incentivizing participation in DeFi activities. Users earn rewards through tasks, multipliers, and referrals, driving engagement and organic growth. By bridging traditional finance with DeFi, the program appeals to both conservative and DeFi-savvy investors, helping to expand Cardano’s user base. The Bills Rewards program is specifically designed to encourage the adoption and utilization of USDO, a yield-bearing stablecoin backed by tokenized U.S. Treasury securities.

Aligns with Cardano’s Core Principles

Security: Ensuring Institutional-Grade Transparency and Compliance

OpenEden’s issuance of USDO through a Bermuda Monetary Authority (BMA) licensed digital asset issuer ensures adherence to stringent regulatory standards. The reserves backing USDO, primarily consisting of U.S. Treasury Bills and reverse repurchase agreements, are managed transparently, providing security and trust for Cardano users.

Scalability: Expanding DeFi with Stable Yield Products

By introducing USDO, Cardano's DeFi ecosystem gains access to a stablecoin that offers daily rebasing yields. This addition can enhance liquidity, enable new collateralization options, and support yield farming strategies, all without compromising Cardano's scalable infrastructure.

Decentralization: Promoting Trust with a Decentralized Framework

USDO's structure, including its issuance by a regulated entity and backing by real-world assets, aligns with decentralized finance principles. Integrating USDO with Cardano's smart contracts can further decentralize asset management, reducing reliance on centralized financial intermediaries.

Supporting Cardano’s Vision for Financial Inclusion

USDO's design facilitates access to yield-bearing, stable digital assets, enabling everyday users to participate in DeFi activities on Cardano. This integration supports Cardano's mission to provide accessible and secure financial services globally.

Enhancing Cardano’s Real-World Adoption

The tokenization of U.S. Treasury securities through USDO bridges traditional finance and blockchain technology. This integration can attract institutional investors and traditional financial institutions to the Cardano ecosystem, increasing real-world use cases and adoption.

Boosting Cardano’s Ecosystem with Stable Assets

Incorporating USDO into Cardano offers a secure, low-risk asset backed by high-quality reserves. This addition enhances Cardano's financial offerings, providing a stable investment option that appeals to a broad range of investors and promotes ecosystem stability.

Driving Innovation through DeFi Product Integration

Integrating USDO with Cardano's blockchain can spur innovation within its DeFi ecosystem. USDO's features, such as daily yield rebasing and backing by real-world assets, enable greater liquidity, fractional ownership, and seamless trading, contributing to the development of a robust decentralized financial system on Cardano.

Aligning with Cardano’s Sustainability Goals

USDO's operation on Cardano's eco-friendly proof-of-stake protocol aligns with sustainability objectives. This synergy creates a low-energy solution for asset management, supporting Cardano's commitment to environmentally responsible financial technologies.

Catalyzing Growth and Ecosystem Value for Cardano

The introduction of USDO is poised to drive new economic activity within the Cardano ecosystem. Offering a secure, yield-generating stablecoin diversifies Cardano's value proposition, attracting more participants and fostering growth in the decentralized economy.

Rising Social Demand for Trustworthy Information Distribution
[Benefits of problem solving]
This project solves the problem by integrating the broad reach of IPDC broadcasting with the immutability and verifiability of Cardano blockchain, enabling a reliable and tamper-proof information delivery infrastructure for all.

The importance of ensuring reliability even in peacetime
[Benefits of problem solving]
This project will achieve these goals by combining broadcasting technology and blockchain technology. As the world's first integrated broadcasting and Web3 infrastructure, we maximize the public credibility of the CARDANO blockchain by using broadcast block information as a reference signal.

Need for a Sustainable Public Information Infrastructure
[Benefits of problem solving]
This project provides a low-cost, resilient, and inclusive information platform by leveraging the robustness of broadcast technology and the decentralized nature of blockchain, offering a sustainable public infrastructure for all communities.

Historic & Unique—Indigenous DAO tools to onboard 100s of groups stewarding billions of economic & ecological value. This proposal directly supports the development of essential collective-first infrastructure. It delivers a fully data-sovereign, local-first identity system—standards-aligned to meet the unique needs of Indigenous peoples, cooperatives, and civic groups, and their deeply relational, communitarian values and operating systems. It is designed so that it will always be owned by the people, rent-free—ensuring true autonomy over identity, governance, and infrastructure. By lowering barriers to entry with the Mātou Protocol (a collective identity pattern), and the accompanying community and developer kits (CDK & SDK), Mātou Collective can welcome hundreds of tribal nations—thousands of humans—to the ecosystem. These tools are designed to support both custom technical development that fits community needs, and community development that helps leaders weave people and technology together. For the Cardano community, this proposal offers both strategic and tangible benefits: DAO Tooling: Matou Protocol (the core collective identity pattern), MatouSDK (software development kit), MatouCDK (community development kit) are designed to drastically lower barriers to technical development (supporting custom tech that fits communities) and community development (supporting leaders weaving people and tech together) Adoption: This project aims to on-board Indigenous nations — populations with active economies already coordinating billions in value of indigenous economic activity, specific examples. Innovation: Cardano will be the first major blockchain to offer a pathway to decentralized, culturally rooted, real-world data sovereignty for Indigenous peoples. Research Impact: This project will generate unique field data and unique design insights on how decentralized systems can serve complex governance, identity, and economic needs. Transactions: Increased transaction volume through real-world governance applications, credential verification services, cross-group economic activities, and token investments and exchanges—all mediated through Cardano's infrastructure. These tokenized interactions drive sustainable growth while providing tangible utility for indigenous communities. We're building tools for an existing, rich, reciprocal, multi-stakeholder ecosystem with clear requirements, validated needs—an ecosystem we're part of and uniquely positioned to serve.

Key benefits for this * enhanced support * are as follows:

Best in class Support

• With Daedalus OGs working on the development, Users will get the best support for the proposed budget "without a steep learning curve".
• Team has experience in all aspects from design, development, hardware wallet integration, cardano-wallet integration with over 300 PRs committed to Daedalus since 2017.

Key Benefits

• The ability to incorporate an augmented Governance Experience supporting
• • DRep search functionality * - presently cut and paste
• • DRep profile viewing * - incorporate ability to view DReps profile on Social Media
• • Upcoming Votes integration * - ability to preview upcoming Governance Actions
• • Engineering Readiness * - ability to deliver value on budget without 'technical ramp-up'
• • Familiar with Product * - working relationship with partners, product and vendors

Value Add

• Ability to incorporate key pipeline items and understand the possible challenges in advance
• History of resolving issues of the past and making the most of available budget
• Optimised to support the Daedalus Community with a view to longevity

Why are we doing this

• Continued value preservation and security applied under priority and threat assessment
• Daedalus Users across post Byron era receive additional features based on budget and criticality
• Innovation on Voting Feature to allow Governance Action voting via Daedalus must continue
• Ensure longevity, support and full node capability for estimated 18-30k users as measure pre Chang + Plomin Hardforks of Q3 ‘24 and Q1 ‘25
• Fairness of Participation - for selection of Delegated Representatives (DReps)
• Retention of a key group of wallet users - full node wallet folks
• Ensure updates which are related to maintenance avoiding product being obsolete
• Ensure original Cardano Wallet provides continuity for OG participants of Cardano
• Incorporate what Layer 2 has to offer once this beings appropriate and adds value

Our proposal retains Daedalus as an uptodate full-node wallet, supporting decentralization, securing value for an important user segment in the Cardano ecosystem.

TL;dr - Security, Continuity, Transparency, Safeguarding of Value

The Cardano Governance Bot will automatically update and present users with the newest information. It can use the scrapers we have already used in other projects to assimilate the information added on governance.

This means that it’ll be up-to-date every single day without fail. The LLMs we aim to use have language modules that can translate information to most other languages with a high degree of accuracy. This will improve information access across many cultures and regions.

Input Output Research (IOR) aims to deliver a pipeline of 20+ high-impact research initiatives annually, each supported by peer-reviewed papers and artefacts. From this pipeline, 6 initiatives will be selected for technical validation through a rigorous, multidisciplinary process involving community, customer, and IO’s R&D team.

Research is committed to academic excellence, with each research paper typically requiring two years due to the complexity and peer-review process. We will maintain an annual output of at least 20 peer-reviewed publications and artefacts that contribute meaningfully to both the Cardano ecosystem and the broader research community. To maximize impact, we are enhancing visibility through targeted dissemination to boost citations, foster collaboration, and solidify Cardano’s reputation in blockchain R&D.

Technology validation (previously called Innovation) streams translate research into practice, delivering six validated outputs annually—including technical reports, formal specifications, prototypes, simulations, Cardano Problem Statements (CPSs), and Cardano Improvement Proposals (CIPs). Prototypes and technical documentation will provide in-depth analysis and serve as critical foundations for product development within the Cardano ecosystem. CIPs, in particular, promote transparency and community-driven evolution, addressing key challenges and helping guide Cardano’s strategic advancement.

To date, Input Output Research has played a catalytic role in growing Cardano into a multi-billion-dollar blockchain. The multi-year, funnel-based approach outlined is designed to strengthen the foundation for Cardano’s continued growth and leadership, ensuring a steady pipeline of high-impact, globally relevant opportunities that address the most significant challenges in blockchain.

If implemented, our proposal would deliver significant benefits across multiple dimensions of the Cardano ecosystem: For the French-speaking community, this project would provide unprecedented access to Cardano resources, education, and governance mechanisms in their native language. This would empower a population of over 300 million French speakers worldwide to actively participate in and contribute to the ecosystem, expanding Cardano's global footprint substantially. For the broader Cardano community, our initiative would enhance the network's diversity and decentralization by incorporating perspectives, talent, and innovation from previously underrepresented regions. The integration of Francophone communities would strengthen Cardano's resilience and adaptive capacity through cultural and intellectual diversity. For developers and entrepreneurs, our university partnerships and educational programs would create a pipeline of skilled talent familiar with Cardano technology. The hackathons and workshops planned throughout the year would stimulate innovation and spawn new projects built on Cardano, enriching the ecosystem's capabilities and use cases. The return on investment for the Cardano community would be measurable and substantial:

Geographic expansion into 5+ French-speaking countries, opening new markets and use cases At least 2 registered member companies in each community represented Minimum of 100 participants in a single town hall meeting by project end Establishment of formal partnerships with universities across multiple countries Creation of sustainable local communities that continue building on Cardano long after the initial funding period Development of region-specific solutions addressing local challenges using Cardano technology

By bridging the language and knowledge gaps, our proposal would transform passive observers into active contributors, directly supporting Cardano's mission of creating a more inclusive and decentralized financial and technological infrastructure worldwide.

Andamio accelerates the Cardano ecosystem's growth by providing live, ecosystem-wide infrastructure that enables projects to identify, verify, and activate talent at scale.

Already live and operational, Andamio will:

• Speed up hiring and contribution readiness for key ecosystem teams.
• Provide Cardano-wide contributor verification, aligned with ecosystem governance goals.
• Reduce friction between learning and contribution.
• Generate real-time ecosystem insights on contributor readiness and project health.

With Andamio, the Cardano ecosystem benefits from:

• Faster scaling of core technical projects.
• Higher throughput of verified contributors.
• Stronger decentralization through transparent talent pipelines.
• Data-driven visibility of contributor growth across the ecosystem.

Supporting our Proposal

• Surveys by Gartner have evidence retention rates being highest on applications where chat features 1-1 and group are embedded. These applications create community and retain 20% more than DeFi.
• Cardano currently offers email like communication which could be greatly enhanced by * Application Level Message Protocol [ALMP]* would the facility to unlock a new type of app (often referred to as SuperApp)
• With a robust mechanism for applications in the Cardano Ecosystem to embed social features, bidirectional communication, topic broadcast this solution enables a new level of interactive conversation on Cardano
• Using the existing Wallet and permissionless model, also bring new utility (beyond DeFi and early stage Governance), users connecting via Wallet also brings value to the wallet community by providing access to community messaging, increase reconnect between projects and wallets holders.
• Having possibilty to converge social, governance, lifestyle and finance thru a new Applicaiton Level Message Protocol [ALMP] is a great uplift to Cardano
• we are optimising for messaging on social apps, application transactions status, governance broadcast type messages whilst enforcing anti-spam mechanisms reduces friction with moving parts of Cardano Blockchain

Acceleration of Growth

This protocol seeks to accelerate the build of inter-application messaging including

• DApps can have a 1-1
• DApps can consider non-SPAM based Group chats
• Social messaging trust reinforced wallet based security
• Introduce utility and revenue earning mesh and potential utility yield for subscription based apps based on ability to join high value subscription services
• Augment recent Governance by providing channels for Community Announcements
• Messaging with security bake-in for Micro-Purchases including Gaming /NFT minting
• Targeted positive developer experience in a messaging protocol with a smooth integration route for React, TypeScript and mobile builders

Availability and Target

• On-ramp for large scale concurrent user based by end of 2025 Q1-2026
• Ability to integrate with Chat SDK to facilitate smooth onboarding using wallet based connection
• Priority integration into Cardano Governance process to enable ‘governance updates for the masses’ including ability for - DReps to broadcast curated messages within agree message-etiquette around voting, preferences and leanings
• Ecosystem message broadcast without violating the anti-spam measurements, incorporating slashing approach where SPAM detected
• Integration of the messaging feature upgrades into Daedalus with provision of chat-sdks to other software wallets

New Sources of Value

• Use SPOs as reliable decentralized relays and store/forward nodes.
• Prevent spam through lightweight proof, rate limiting, and token bonding.
• Provide privacy through encrypted, ephemeral identities and routing obfuscation.
• Be modular enough to expand into notification services, governance signals, or collaborative DApps.

Genesis + DHT-based protocol would

• Allow full-node/software/hardware wallets (via proxy) to communicate securely and anonymously and to receive updated on app-state, governance-actions, community-updates

• Long-Term Support: Ensure BloxBean tools remain compatible with future Cardano upgrades for a seamless developer experience.

• Enhanced Developer Efficiency: Improve tools and documentation, making it easier for developers to build on Cardano using Java and other JVM languages.

• Ecosystem Growth: Support the continued adoption and integration of BloxBean tools by Java developers, benefiting the overall Cardano ecosystem.

• Open-Source: Maintain these tools as open-source projects, encouraging collaboration and contributions from the global developer community.

Benefits of HausCoin Implementation and Its Impact on the Community

HausCoin introduces a blockchain-based real estate liquidity solution, benefiting multiple stakeholders, including homeowners, investors, financial institutions, and the Cardano community.

1. Homeowners (Home-Rich, Cash-Poor Individuals)

• Liquidity Without Debt: Access home equity without selling or taking on loans.
• Financial Flexibility: Use unlocked funds for investments, emergencies, or retirement.
• Lower Barriers to Entry: Unlike traditional home equity loans, no income verification or high credit score is required.

2. Investors (Retail & Institutional)

• New Asset Class: Gain exposure to real estate equity without managing physical properties.
• Higher Yields: Historically, real estate outperforms inflation and offers stable returns. Our model has returned as high as 24.5% IRR over the last 5 years.
• Blockchain Transparency: Asset-backed investments with verifiable, secure transactions.

3. Financial Institutions & Capital Markets

• Increased Market Efficiency: Tokenizing home equity transforms a traditionally illiquid market by streamlining transactions and unlocking liquidity. Smart contract-driven settlements reduce capital requirements by 30x, enabling faster and more efficient asset trading.
• Diversification Opportunities: Banks, funds, and lenders can access real estate assets in a structured, decentralized manner.
• Securitization on Blockchain: Digital assets streamline settlement, significantly lowering costs and accelerating transactions. Blockchain-enabled securitization can cut costs by over 90%, enhancing efficiency and market accessibility.

4. Cardano Community – Demonstrated ROI & Value Creation

HausCoin on Cardano Drives Network Utilization

• Every transaction involving HausCoin generates activity on the Cardano blockchain, increasing network adoption

Our proposal delivers a fully integrated, intelligent, and incentivized governance platform that transforms participation across the Cardano ecosystem. It brings together live tools, structured education, transparent analytics, and reward-based engagement to benefit every stakeholder:

• ADA holders get multilingual onboarding and structured Learn-to-Earn tracks to understand governance, delegation, and participation. They earn Karma for completing modules, giving feedback, and participating in polls, which unlocks recognition and deeper engagement.
• DReps and SPOs receive dedicated education on vote key setup, registration, rationale writing, and proposal coordination. They can use built-in sentiment polling to gather early input from delegators and access dashboards showing their voting history, rationale quality, participation consistency, and delegation trends. As they engage, they earn Karma, which increases their visibility in the Explorer and unlocks access to advanced tools and challenge creation.
• Constitutional Committee members are trained through procedural simulations and onboarding modules. Dashboards track readiness and activity, ensuring consistency, accountability, and informed decision-making in high-stakes roles.
• Governance Challenges (One of our proposed feature) provide a custom incentive system where Karma-qualified participants can earn ADA by completing governance-related tasks. Any verified governance actor or ecosystem entity can launch challenges to crowdsource feedback, rationale, or insights.
• Developers and researchers gain access to open, structured governance data through APIs and SDKs. This enables new tooling, dashboards, and ecosystem integrations, while supporting research and innovation around voting behavior and proposal impact.
• We're proposing to build on an existing foundation of live tools - Chat, Polling, BudgetAI and Analytics. The GovHub is mobile-ready, multi-lingual, open-source and built to scale with Cardano's global governance ecosystem.

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Cardano Constitution ratification was a major milestone, it surfaced multiple unresolved governance questions, now known as Future Workstreams. These workstreams represent essential areas of ongoing development (e.g. constitutional interpretation, dispute resolution, participatory governance design.

This proposal will enable the continuation and expansion of community-led governance work that began with the Constitution's Definitions document.

• Support cross-jurisdictional dialogue and implementation.

• Leveraging diverse cultural and geographic backgrounds to demonstrate how Cardano's tools, network, and ways of working can be effectively shared globally.
• This work does not cover the work of community hubs or other initiatives. Instead, this is an additional opportunity for Community Hubs to get involved with constitutional matters.

• Create a system of non-hierarchical stewardship of the workstreams (not power consolidation).

• Creating a pathway for the wider Cardano community to participate in solving governance challenges
• Leveraging AI technological advancements to push for fair ways of working.
• Establish a multisig system by which work can be reliably incentivized across the diverse Cardano community.

• Develop reproducible models for inclusive and transparent governance work in a decentralized ecosystem.

• Bridging from the Delegate cohort to the broader Cardano community, ensuring constitutional knowledge doesn't remain siloed
• Establishing clear methodologies for community-driven initiative-taking that allows for self-organizing while enabling high levels of collaboration and inclusivity
• Building structures that can evolve and adapt as the community learns and faces new challenges

The return on investment for the Cardano community includes resolving constitutional debt, creating more inclusive governance frameworks, and establishing processes that can be reused for future community initiatives.

$2.5m cost avoidance opportunity & ~39,000 dev. hours savings for products seeking to integrate native asset display – removing barriers to entry, faster new product launches, improved end-user exp. & increased innovation prospects.

Tangible Benefits

• Eliminate up-front infrastructure costs (~$100,000 per product) for native asset display
• Accelerate product development by 9+ months by removing the need to build and maintain complex, scalable infrastructure
• Immediate cost avoidance opportunity of ~$1.5m and ~23,400 developer hours across 15+ existing NFTCDN customers
• Future potential cost avoidance opportunity of ~$1m and ~15,600 developer hours during proposal funding cycle by onboarding at least 10 additional products

Intangible Benefits

• Removes Adoption Barriers - Eliminates financial (OPEX/CAPEX) & technical (dev. complexity) barriers to entry
• Accelerates Time-to-Market - Enables fast and easy integration of native asset features/capabilities
• Frees Up Product Teams - Reduces backend overhead, letting teams focus on core feature dev, growth & adoption
• Boosts Developer Adoption - Makes accessible for early-stage, under/unfunded and community (free-product) builders
• Enables Broader Innovation - Enables exploration of new native asset use cases (RWA, identity, media, education)
• Future-Proof Native Asset Delivery - Adapts to evolving standards; all users benefit from shared upgrades and fixes
• Eliminates Redundancy - Shared infrastructure avoids every project building redundant, costly systems
• Improves End-User Experience - A high-speed, enterprise-grade, globally distributed CDN for multimedia content substantially improves loading speeds
• Drives Ecosystem Growth – Native asset adoption across more apps creates compounding utility and user adoption
• Aligns with Cardano's Goals & Roadmap – Directly supports Cardano's 2025 roadmaps goals around simplifying developer experience, increasing real-world utility and improving end-user experience

Alignment with [2025 Proposed Cardano Goals]

• "Get More Usage" Category
  • Goal: Attract DApps and users - product market fit
  • Goal: Easier to build on and to use Cardano
  • Goal: Cardano competitive option
  • Goal: Clear funding mechanisms

Alignment with [2025 Proposed Cardano Roadmap]

• "Developer/User Experience" Category

This proposal will directly strengthen Cardano's on-chain governance by delivering hands-on education, maintaining essential infrastructure, and cultivating a pipeline of empowered governance actors.

Read more at the "Formatted Proposal Document" link at the bottom of this page.

This proposal will position Cardano as a leader in blockchain privacy, enhancing its competitiveness against other networks. It will have three major benefits:

1. Strengthen Cardano as a robust privacy platform. This proposal will enable the deployment of privacy-focused protocols—such as mixers, voting dApps, and private wallets—that can operate securely and anonymously on the network. It will also standardize privacy infrastructure across diverse use cases, improving interoperability, developer and user experience. The solution consists of the development of two key pieces: A General privacy protocol and relay infrastructure.

2. Increase the Cardano ecosystem growth. This proposal will drive growth across the Cardano ecosystem by attracting new users and increasing on-chain activity, leading to greater overall network utilization. It will also encourage developer engagement and support the launch of privacy-focused projects, expanding Cardano’s use cases and strengthening its position in the blockchain space.

3. It will inject liquidity into the Cardano ecosystem. By expanding Cardano’s footprint in the privacy sector, this proposal will unlock new streams of capital and attract privacy-focused users and investors. Increased transaction volume will also lead to greater fee generation, directly benefiting the Cardano treasury.

UPLC Converter will significantly support developers and boost the capabilities of the Cardano blockchain, making it more competitive, versatile, and attractive to both developers and users seeking advanced, efficient, and secure blockchain solutions.

By enabling the integration of zero knowledge circuits into smart contracts, the UPLC Converter facilitates the development of applications that can provide stronger privacy guarantees. This is particularly beneficial for applications requiring data sensitivity, such as in finance or personal data management, where users can interact with smart contracts without revealing underlying private information.

zkFold will develop and implement ZK rollups on Cardano to scale it efficiently, promoting broader adoption and supporting an ecosystem of decentralized applications and services. Overall, our proposal will have the following positive impact on the Cardano ecosystem:

• Improved Scalability: ZK rollups enable Cardano to process significantly more transactions per second (TPS) by bundling and verifying transactions off-chain. This reduces congestion, benefiting users by ensuring faster and more efficient dApp interactions.
• Lower Transaction Costs: By reducing the number of transactions directly processed on-chain, ZK rollups lower the transaction fees, making Cardano more accessible and affordable, especially for smaller transactions or micro-payments.
• Enhanced User Experience: Lower fees create a smoother experience for users interacting with dApps, decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms, and NFT marketplaces.
• Increased Adoption: ZK rollups can make the Cardano ecosystem more attractive for developers and users, promoting the growth of dApps, DeFi, and other blockchain applications by offering higher performance and scalability.
• Maintained Security: ZK rollups allow for scalability improvements without compromising the security and decentralization of the Cardano base layer, as Cardano still plays the role of the settlement layer for the rollup transactions.