IOG Moves Cardano Consensus Team to Serokell and DevX to AlwaysTrue

Input Output announced on November 5 that Cardano’s consensus engineering team will move from IO Labs to Serokell, while its Developer Experience (DevX) team will transition to AlwaysTrue. Both groups will continue working on their existing projects, with engineers moving alongside the software they maintain. The transfers form part of a broader effort to distribute responsibility for Cardano’s core infrastructure among independent organizations.

Serokell Takes Over Consensus as AlwaysTrue Continues DevX

Cardano’s consensus layer is responsible for determining which blockchain history network nodes should follow. It implements Ouroboros, the proof-of-stake protocol that governs block production and chain selection. The team also maintains the hard fork combinator, which enables Cardano to transition between protocol eras without restarting the blockchain.

Serokell has an established history with Cardano. Before the network's mainnet launch in 2017, its engineers worked with IOHK on Cardano SL, the first Cardano node, and the original Ouroboros implementation. The company also funds engineers working on the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC), a key component of the toolchain used to build Cardano's reference node.

The DevX team will join AlwaysTrue, a company involved in Cardano smart contract auditing and developer tooling since 2021. Robertino Martinez, who led the Developer Experience initiative proposed by Input Output and ratified by Cardano's DReps, will continue that work within the organization.

DevX covers documentation, libraries, development examples, and deployment tools. AlwaysTrue's existing projects include cardano-init, which creates a ready-to-use Cardano protocol repository through a single command. Its ContractsLibrary initiative, targeted for November, is developing reusable smart contracts accompanied by off-chain builders, technical specifications, and formal proofs using Lean 4.

What Changes for Cardano Developers and Stake Pool Operators

The transfers concern responsibility for software development and maintenance rather than a change to Cardano's consensus protocol. The announcement does not introduce changes to staking delegation, reward calculations, or wallet operations.

Consensus code will remain in the public repositories maintained under the IntersectMBO GitHub organization. Developer tools maintained by AlwaysTrue will also remain open source under the Apache 2.0 license.

The engineering teams will move according to separate schedules, allowing development work to continue during the organizational transition. Planning and coordination will take place publicly through Intersect.

Both receiving organizations already have experience with the components they are taking on. Serokell previously helped build Cardano's original node and consensus implementation, while AlwaysTrue has been involved in delivering DevX work since the initiative began.

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Cardano's Engineering Transition Continues Into 2027

The latest transfers follow several other changes announced during 2026 as Cardano's core engineering responsibilities move beyond IO Labs.

Mithril development has moved to Teragone, while Daedalus has transferred to Se7en Labs. BlockPQR has taken on engineering work involving the ledger, blockchain indexer, formal methods, and high availability. Plutus has moved to Midgard Labs.

ICAN Group has also assumed responsibilities covering platform engineering, quality assurance, cryptography, performance, and tracing.

According to Input Output, these transfers are intended to distribute Cardano's core engineering responsibilities across organizations already contributing to the ecosystem. The engineers remain involved with the systems they have been developing, while the code continues to be maintained in public repositories.

The Serokell and AlwaysTrue transitions are scheduled to begin in November 2026 and continue into early 2027. Input Output has not established a single completion date for the transfers, with each engineering team following its own timetable and coordinating the process publicly through Intersect.