Meeting Minutes November 05, 2025

Attendees:

Name	Attendance	Role	Voting Seat (Y/N)	Term
Kevin Hammond	Yes	Chair	Y	October 2025
Adam Dean	Yes	Vice Chair	Y	October 2025
Terence ‘Tex’ McCutcheon	Yes	Secretary	N	N/A
Nicolas Biri	No	Member/Seat	Y	April 2026
Duncan Coutts	No	Member/Seat	Y	April 2026
Sebastian Nagel	Yes	Member/Seat	Y	April 2026
Neil Davies	Yes	Member/Seat	Y	April 2026
Alexander Moser	No	Member/Seat	Y	April 2026
Markus Gufler	Yes	Member/Seat	Y	October 2025
Jonathan Kelly	No	Member/Seat	Y	October 2025
Benjamin Hart	Yes	Member/Seat	Y	October 2025

Community/Other Attendees

• Christian Taylor

• Seungheon Oh

• Tevo Kask

Recording: Technical Steering Committee - 2025/11/05 - Recording

Transcript: Technical Steering Committee - 2025/11/05 08:26 CST - Transcript

Chat Transcript: Technical Steering Committee - 2025/11/05 - Chat Transcript

Intros

Adam: OSC, TSC, CIP Editor, DripDropz LLC Alex: Head of Infrastructure, Cardano Foundation, TSC member, Parameter Committee co-chair, CF Drep committee voting member, Ben: TBD Duncan: TBD Johnny: Non-Custodial Co-Management SysOps Engineer (Tech Janitor) for 3 Mainnet Cardano SPO Clients. Keystone Ambassador. Voting Seat Member on Technical Steering Committee and Open Source Committee. Kevin: TSC chair, Hylomorph Solutions Ltd Markus: TSC voting member, CF employee, SPO Neil: TSC, Network Params, PNSol Ltd Nicolas: TSC member, IOG Sebastian: Software Engineer/Architect, nCoding GmbH, IOE, TSC member Tex: OS Program Manager (Intersect), GMC/MCC/OSC Secretary, Committee Liaison

Agenda 11.05.25

• Alexander Esgen - Kevin

• Report on UPLC Conference in Edinburgh - Kevin

  • https://plutus.cardano.intersectmbo.org/uplc2025/

• Update on Node Status - Johnny

• Hard Fork Working Group - Tex

• Plutus Parameter Update - Alex

• Feedback on Cardano 2030 Strategic Plan - Kevin/Adam

  • https://product.cardano.intersectmbo.org/vision/strategy-2030/#4-enabling-technology

• Feedback on Intersect Mission/Purpose

• Budget Committee Blog - Kevin

  • https://www.intersectmbo.org/news/building-a-better-budget-process-for-2026-proposing-a-multi-step-framework

• Marcin’s Questions about maintaining IO-Sim etc. - Christian

  • Really for the OSC?

• Election Status - Tex

Decisions/Actions

Decisions

• The motion to send condolences to Alex Egen's family, colleagues, and the community was approved. A formal vote was deemed unnecessary.

• The Hard Fork Working Group (HFWG) will be set up immediately to get started on the Q1 Hard Fork preparation.

• The group agreed to use a Doodle poll(or similar) to determine the best time/cadence for the new HFWG meetings, with a preference for European afternoon times.

• The current meeting time may move after the newly elected members join (to be decided in a couple of weeks).

• The team will pursue the proposed Plutus parameter update to increase memory unit limits, following positive feedback on the preview.

Actions

• Kevin and Terence will run a new meeting time past the newly elected members.

• Neil will find out how people can express their sympathies to Alex Egen's family and what the appropriate form of wake might be.

• Kevin will raise the question with Zeang about opening up the annual UPLC conference to a wider audience.

• Terence will create and distribute a Doodle poll to agree on a time for the Hard Fork Working Group.

• Kevin will collect and summarize the TSC/committee's feedback on the Cardano 2030 Strategic Plan for Sam to present at the Cardano Summit.

• Kevin will check and pass on the correct document describing Intersect's mission and purpose (correcting the duplicate link).

• The group members will review the budget committee blog and provide any appropriate feedback.

• Christian will go back and ask Martin (Networking Team) to clarify the originating purpose for requesting the transfer of the repositories to Intersect ownership.

• Kevin and Terence will review the onboarding deck next week at the Cardano Summit.

• All current members are encouraged to vote in the ongoing committee elections.

Topic	Discussion	Notes
Meeting Conflict & Scheduling	Conflicts noted with Sebastian's Leios meeting. Terence suggested moving the meeting time after new members join. Kevin agreed to run a new time past the incoming members.	A Doodle poll was later suggested by Kevin to agree on a time (European afternoon preference).
Agenda Additions	Kevin asked for additions to the agenda. Terence confirmed he had an item.	Agenda confirmed.
Cardano Summit Conflict	Kevin noted several members (Marcus, Sebastian, Adam) will be at the summit next week. Ben will not be going but could attend virtually.	Kevin suggested canceling or holding the meeting in person at the summit next week.
Core Developer Alex Egen's Passing	Kevin announced the sad news of Alex Esgen's passing, noting his critical role in the consensus team. He motioned to send condolences from the TSC and Intersect.	Neil agreed a formal vote was not needed, confirmed the shock, and will seek ways for the community to express sympathies and plan a form of wake.
UPLC Conference Report (Edinburgh)	Kevin reported on the 3-day event (30-35 attendees) for core UPLC dev teams and ecosystem partners. Seungheon introduced himself as a prospective member and detailed the focus on presentations and future features.	Kevin highlighted work on meta-programming and optimization.
UPLC Conference Format	Adam asked if the invite-only workshop would be ongoing and more open in the future. Kevin confirmed it was invite-only but plans to repeat annually and will suggest opening it up.	Seungheon confirmed that all presentations were recorded and will be published soon on YouTube.
JVM Compilation and JIT Risks	Kevin discussed a talk on compiling to JVM for performance, suitable for L2 chains, but expressed caution for Mainnet. Neil raised concerns about formal proof and the security risks of Just-In-Time (JIT) compilers.	The general feeling was that JVM JIT for on-chain is too risky due to a lack of formal proof.
Smart Contract Verification/Proving	Kevin noted work on proving smart contract properties at various levels, including verifying compiler outcomes rather than the compiler itself. Seungheon clarified this involves proving semantic equivalence of code before and after optimizations.	Neil stressed the importance of knowing what "correct" means in this context and the challenges of building confidence.
Plutus Costing Framework Update	Kevin mentioned K McKenzie's presentation on the UPLC costing framework. Noted a significant overestimation (e.g., 800 vs. 20) in the memory usage costing for basic Plutous operations.	Neil noted this discrepancy could pose a performance problem if memory limits are suddenly reduced. Kevin confirmed the current inflated memory cost fortuitously controls CPU cost.
Cryptographic Primitives and Protocol v11	Kevin mentioned Adam's talk on heavy use of crypto primitives, showing that the new BLS/M2M primitives in Protocol Version 11 will significantly reduce cryptographic operation time and budget.	This is seen as a great benefit for the community. Kevin will get copies of the scripts for benchmarking.
Plutus Incremental Improvements	Seungheon and Kevin discussed incremental UPLC improvements, mainly optimizing case expressions (on booleans, tuples, list, unit) for a 40-60% performance gain, to be rolled out in v11 and v12.	These improvements will not require protocol parameter changes.
Node Release Status (v10.6)	Kevin gave a brief update, noting node v10.6 is hitting memory usage issues when syncing from Genesis with LMDB. A fix isn't ready. A v10.5.2 patch for a network churn glitch is planned.	Focus may switch to v10.7 as the candidate for Protocol Version 11 Hard Fork, likely pushing the hard fork to Q1 2026.
Hard Fork Working Group (HFWG) Cadence	Terence asked for suggestions on a good HFWG meeting cadence. Adam strongly urged immediate action to prevent delays to the Q1 Hard Fork target, noting the need to get exchanges/downstream tooling ready.	Kevin and Terence will coordinate to send out a Doodle poll to agree on a time.
Cardano 2030 Strategic Plan Feedback	Kevin requested feedback on the plan's technology enabling pillar, noting he had a document collecting feedback. Adam expressed strong opposition to prescriptive technologies (like Hydra, Laos) in the strategy, advocating for a high-level, capability-focused vision instead of an IO wish list. Neil and Terence agreed it should focus on capabilities and outcomes.	Kevin will collect and summarize feedback for presentation at the Cardano Summit.
Repository Ownership/Maintenance	Christian presented a proposal from Martin (Networking Team) to move connect-protocols, io-sim, and typed-protocols repositories under the Intersect banner. Neil provided context, explaining they were split out as general-purpose services (e.g., io-sim for property testing).	Adam questioned why IO/Well-Typed isn't maintaining them and expressed concern over creeping scope for Intersect. Ben noted they are upstream dependencies of the node, and the core issue is the cost of maintenance and organizational responsibility. Christian will follow up with Martin to clarify the originating purpose of the request.
Committee Election Status	Terence reported that voting closes on Friday at noon UTC (7 a.m. CST). Results are expected on the 14th.	Kevin and Terence will work on the onboarding deck at the Cardano Summit. New members will be onboarded in the meeting in about two weeks.