Light Clients Technical Workshop

​Input Output Research (IOR) is hosting the next session in a series of technical workshops under Cardano Vision 26. The aim of the Light Client workshop is to drive specifications and requirements, foster roadmap discussions, and get an overview of possible implementations in that context.

As Cardano’s ecosystem expands to mobile wallets, bridges, L2s and resource-constrained devices, there is a growing need for ways to interact with the chain securely without running a full node. The research work explores a spectrum of light client designs, ranging from syncing clients that independently follow and verify chain state, building on existing work such as Mithril, to provider-assisted approaches such as transaction building services, where much of the work is offloaded to a provider while the client retains the ability to check what it signs. A central challenge is navigating the trade-offs between trust assumptions, bandwidth, computation, communication overhead and user experience, while at the same time ensuring that security guarantees remain in place.

The workshop is aimed at teams building or planning light client implementations, including wallet, bridge and infrastructure developers, with the goal of aligning on requirements, interfaces and a path toward production-ready tooling. We are hoping to get a lively discussion going, so please bring questions.

This workshop will be hosted by Fergie Miller, Director of Research Partnerships, and Marc Roeschlin, Research Fellow at Input Output Group.