Blink Labs, Cardano Foundation, dcSpark, Sundae Labs, and TxPipe—five entities focused on IT development and engineering in the Cardano ecosystem—have announced the launch of PRAGMA, a member-based, not-for-profit open-source association for blockchain software projects. The association, which aims to foster and contribute to Cardano’s growing open source ecosystem, will be constituted on 22nd April.

PRAGMA’s initial primary goal is to foster an open-source ecosystem for Cardano by hosting existing projects and helping them to thrive. It also aims to facilitate the development and emergence of new meaningful tools where needed. In the long term, the goal is for the association to become a home to blockchain-related open-source projects that seek collective ownership.

The current organizational phase of PRAGMA focuses on selecting key projects for the Cardano ecosystem. One project: Amaru, aims to build a Cardano node in Rust which can run side-by-side the existing Haskell node in a fully interoperable manner. The second project: Aiken, a smart contract platform specifically created to both simplify and enhance the development of smart contracts on Cardano. Upon entering the next phase slated for 2025, membership will open to developers within the broader Cardano ecosystem.

Sebastian Bode, Director of Engineering at the Cardano Foundation and Board Member of PRAGMA, said: “PRAGMA is a team of passionate software engineers from various backgrounds who build open-source tools for developers aiming for mass adoption of blockchain. As such, it represents an important step forward in the Cardano Foundation’s mission to support Cardano becoming a public infrastructure.”