IOG Assigns Cardano Consensus to Serokell, Developer Experience Work to AlwaysTrue

Input Output Group (IOG) assigned Cardano’s consensus engineering to Serokell and developer-experience work to AlwaysTrue, moving two engineering functions to separate organizations during a transition that runs into 2027.

IOG announced the assignments Nov. 5. Engineers will move to their new teams with the work they already handle. The two handoffs have separate timelines, extending from November 2026 into early 2027. Development will continue during the handoffs, with transition planning coordinated publicly through Intersect.

Serokell will develop and maintain Cardano’s consensus implementation. Its responsibilities include the Ouroboros libraries and integrating them with the Cardano node. The work also covers block production, chain selection and the hard fork combinator. The consensus code will remain in public repositories under IntersectMBO on GitHub.

AlwaysTrue’s assignment covers a broad range of developer-experience work. The portfolio includes documentation, libraries, examples and deployment support, along with tools. Those tools will remain open source under the Apache 2.0 license. The separate assignments place consensus software and developer support with different organizations.

The changes follow other engineering assignments across Cardano. Mithril moved to Teragone, Daedalus to Se7en Labs and Plutus to Midgard Labs. BlockPQR and ICAN Group have received assignments covering other engineering work.

Before Cardano’s 2017 mainnet launch, Serokell contributed to IOHK’s first node and an early Ouroboros implementation. The new assignment puts the company on consensus engineering that includes Ouroboros libraries and their integration with the Cardano node.

Cardano (ADA) holders can participate directly or through delegated representatives in governance decisions, including protocol updates, treasury withdrawals and future hard forks. The Plomin hard fork enabled full on-chain governance actions on Jan. 29, 2025. IOG’s Nov. 5 announcement concerns engineering responsibilities and does not describe a change to Cardano’s governance framework.

“The work continues throughout, coordinated in the open through Intersect,” Input Output wrote in its Nov. 5 announcement.