Plutus
Making Cardano's smart-contract platform easier to build on, cheaper to run, and more rigorously verified. Delivered as a co-venture between Input Output and VacuumLabs.
The team behind the initiative
The opportunity
Plutus, a compact lambda-calculus-based language executed by Cardano nodes, serves as the foundation of all Cardano smart contracts. Its quality and capabilities directly influence what developers can build, how quickly they can build it, and how much confidence they can place in the results. There are three interconnected areas where further improvements would strengthen Plutus’s ability to fulfill this role.
First, execution efficiency and expressiveness. On-chain execution costs are critical to Cardano's competitiveness. Targeted expansion of UPLC capabilities and primitives, such as efficient pattern matching on the ubiquitous Data type, built-ins for common list, value and cryptographic operations, and removal of scope-checking overhead that adds roughly 25% to script preparation time without providing a security benefit, can deliver meaningful reductions in script size and execution budget.
Second, formal verification, conformance, and security. As node diversity becomes a reality, correctness guarantees must keep pace. The Plutus metatheory currently lacks formalization for many built-in functions, and conformance testing falls back to the reference implementation. Extending formal coverage and building a property-based testing framework would close this gap, while continuous security auditing of the evaluator and costing code would surface risks before they reach production.
Third, developer experience and tooling. The smart contract developer experience would benefit from a compiler and optimizer architecture that produces clear, source-level error messages and eliminates the need for boilerplate. A simpler project setup that does not require Nix or native C library dependencies, along with other usability improvements, would make it significantly easier for new developers to start building on Cardano.
The Initiative
Plutus
This proposal funds three workstreams that collectively address execution efficiency, formal correctness, and developer experience for Cardano’s Plutus smart contract platform.
- Workstream 1: Plutus capabilities and primitives. Extends the UPLC execution model and built-in function set. Delivers support for casing on the built-in Data type (significantly reducing execution costs for most contracts), an investigation into removing the redundant scope check, a SNARK-friendly Poseidon hash function (conditional on benchmarks), implementation of the ratified multiIndexArray built-in (CIP-0156), additional BuiltinValue functions for multi-asset operations (CIP-0168), and a CIP exploring laziness and memoization in UPLC.
- Workstream 2: Formal specification, correctness, and security. Strengthens the formal foundations of Plutus program execution. Delivers a property-based conformance testing framework that extends the current test suite, which supports node diversity by enabling alternative Plutus evaluators to verify correctness against the canonical implementation; a systematic security and correctness audit of the security-critical code (such as the Plutus evaluator and costing); and formalization of programmatic built-in types and functions in the Plutus metatheory (Agda).
- Workstream 3: Developer experience. Introduces a new compiler and optimizer architecture that improves code optimization, provides clearer source-level error messages, and reduces boilerplate. It also simplifies setting up the development environment, removing the need for tools like Nix or manual dependency installation.
Why now: The Plutus team has completed development for the upcoming Van Rossem hard fork, creating a natural window for these improvements till the Dijkstra hard fork. Changes that require a hard fork, such as removing the scope check, need to be completed in time for Dijkstra. Meanwhile, it is important to continue building on the developer experience and usability improvements, which are critical for Cardano’s adoption. Further, investing in formal specification, cross-implementation conformance, and structured auditing now is significantly more cost-effective than responding to incidents in production, especially as Cardano adoption increases and node diversity becomes a reality.
Treasury ask: ₳11,877,575
Who is building
This initiative is led by Ziyang Liu at Input Output Group, delivered as a co-venture with VacuumLabs, a specialist firm with deep expertise in formal methods, security-critical Haskell development, and Cardano infrastructure.
The partnership is planned and purposeful. Both organizations are investing in Plutus as shared public infrastructure for the Cardano ecosystem. This distributed ownership model reflects what a maturing ecosystem looks like: core infrastructure maintained by a consortium of expert teams, not dependent on any single contributor.
Expected outcomes
- Pattern-matching on the built-in Data type becomes a first-class UPLC operation, reducing script size and execution costs for the large majority of validators that operate on Data.
- New built-in functions enabling cross-chain interoperability, ZK proofs (Poseidon), and efficient list and multi-asset value handling (CIP-0156, CIP-0168).
- A CIP or technical report on scope check removal with quantitative evidence, either unlocking a ~25% reduction in script preparation overhead or documenting why the current design should remain.
- A CIP exploring laziness in UPLC for community discussion, addressing a long-standing expressiveness gap.
- A property-based conformance testing framework, allowing alternative node implementations to verify correctness against the canonical implementation.
- The Plutus metatheory is extended to formalize certain programmatic built-in types and functions.
- Continuous security auditing of the evaluator and costing code, with a written audit report covering findings and recommendations.
- A new compiler and optimizer architecture that optimizes code better, provides clearer source-level error messages, reduces boilerplate, and simplifies setup.
Ecosystem Impact
Plutus improvements touch more 2030 KPIs than almost any other proposal. Lower execution costs directly drive Monthly Transactions by making transactions cheaper and enabling application designs that were previously uneconomical. Developer tooling improvements drive MAU by reducing the drop-off rate for new developers and expanding the pool of builders who ship contracts. Formal specification and conformance testing directly enable Alternative Full Node Clients. Security auditing and correctness guarantees support Reliability and strengthen the trust that underpins TVL and Revenue/Adoption.
The VacuumLabs co-venture is itself an ecosystem outcome: it distributes Plutus maintenance expertise across multiple organizations, directly reducing the risk of a single point of failure in tooling stewardship and advancing Ecosystem Sustainability and Resilience.
Governance links
Formal treasury proposal
The on-chain submission, read the full proposal text and rationale.
View the formal proposalJoin the Conversation
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