At a glance
- We’re requesting 62,134,630 ada, to maintain Cardano’s core infrastructure for 9 months – Q3 2026 through Q1 2027.
- Nine functional areas are covered: node bugfixing, DevOps/CI-CD, performance, QA, release management, monitoring, open source, documentation, and component maintenance.
- Cardano’s 99.98% uptime record, predictable release cycles, and the governance tooling DReps depend on all rest on this funded work.
- Funds are disbursed via Intersect’s TRSC/PSSC framework with milestone-gated payments, third-party assurance, and full on-chain transparency.
- We’re asking DReps to review and vote during the current governance window.
- Cardano's full maintenance budget for nine months sits below the annual maintenance spend of Ethereum ($25–50M/year) and Solana ($30–60M/year), and is more transparent about what it covers.
A Cardano targeting 27 million monthly transactions needs a foundation that holds
Every DApp, every governance action, every transaction on Cardano runs on infrastructure that most people never think about. That’s the work we do. You don’t notice it when it works. You notice immediately when it doesn’t. The Cardano Maintenance proposal is how we’re asking to fund that work for nine months, from Q3 2026 through Q1 2027.
This isn't a feature proposal. It’s the one that makes every other proposal possible.
What Cardano has built – and what it takes to keep it
Cardano’s 2030 target is 27 million monthly transactions. Getting there depends on the platform performing with the reliability it has earned. The 99.98% uptime record we’re at today comes from continuous work on systems most users never consider: node bugfixing, CI/CD infrastructure, E2E testing, conformance pipelines, performance benchmarking at the integration level, and round-the-clock incident support.
Nine functional areas, running in parallel, for nine months
Effort is distributed across nine activity streams, weighted by where the platform needs the work most. DevOps and CI/CD takes the largest share at 25%, reflecting the cost of running the infrastructure every release moves through. Technical debt reduction and downstream dependency maintenance each take around 14%, performance and tracing and quality assurance each around 11%, with the remainder distributed across security, documentation, release management, support, and incident response. Every category maps to a deliverable; every deliverable maps to a milestone.
Here’s what we’ll deliver across nine functional areas over nine months:
- Node bugfixing and architecture: timely issue resolution, hot fixes, and security reviews.
- DevOps and CI/CD: system maintenance, OS/platform compatibility, Haskell compiler support, disaster recovery per CIP-135, bootstrap relay operations, and testnet maintenance.
- Monitoring: mainnet monitoring for oversight and community, plus global mempool monitoring for fee estimation and evidence-based decision-making.
- Documentation: the Cardano Blueprint – implementation-independent specifications for consensus, network, ledger, and Plutus, enabling alternative node clients.
- Open source: GitHub issue triage, response, assignment, and integration of external contributions.
- Performance: systematic ledger analysis, system-level node optimizations, and integration-level benchmarking that safeguards every hard fork and release.
- Quality assurance: E2E and conformance testing, release sign-off, and AI-augmented QA analysis.
- Release and support: full node release process, L1/L2/L3 incident management with on-call support, and Cardano API/CLI maintenance.
- Component maintenance: Plutus Core interpreter updates, tech debt reduction, third-party library maintenance (libsodium), and guardrails and CC identity script maintenance.
All nine run continuously across the full funded period. Maintenance is constant.
How this compares
Cardano's maintenance budget is a transparent number. It also turns out to be a competitive one. Public estimates put Ethereum's annual maintenance and technical debt investment at $25–50 million per year across the Ethereum Foundation, Protocol Guild, and independent client teams. Solana's equivalent runs $30–60 million per year across Anza, Firedancer, Jito, and Foundation activities. Cardano's nine-month maintenance ask, at current ada prices, sits below both.
Two things matter about that comparison. First, Cardano's figure includes technical debt reduction explicitly, which most ecosystems either bundle into other categories or do not publish. Second, the work itself is structurally different. Cardano runs on a high-assurance stack: Haskell, formal methods, conformance testing for alternative clients, and dedicated maintenance for Plutus Core, DB-Sync, and libsodium. That work is what makes the platform predictable for builders and verifiable for DReps. It is not optional, and it is not directly comparable to chains that operate without those guarantees.
A collaborative model that strengthens the ecosystem
This proposal introduces a delivery collaboration with Ensurable Systems. IO leads, funds, and remains fully accountable for every deliverable under the legal contract administered by Intersect. Ensurable adds specialist Cardano core infrastructure expertise – a deliberate step toward distributing infrastructure stewardship across the ecosystem.
Governance that DReps can verify
Funds come to us via Intersect’s Treasury Reserve Smart Contract (TRSC) and Project-Specific Smart Contracts (PSSC), with milestone-gated payments and third-party assurance at each stage. An independent Oversight Committee – Sundae Labs, the Cardano Foundation, Dquadrant, Xerberus, and NMKR – verifies key administrative actions on-chain. We publish weekly development reports, and a community dashboard makes fund status auditable at any time. Anything we don’t disburse returns to the Cardano Treasury with public reconciliation.
This is the same milestone acceptance and third-party assurance process operated through the previous funding round, with monthly submissions verified before any disbursement.
Cost trajectory
Maintenance cost is not a fixed line. The rollout of Genesis removes the bootstrap node infrastructure that has been part of Cardano's operational footprint to date, lowering annual costs by approximately $200,000. AI-powered QA is being integrated specifically to prevent maintenance from scaling linearly with throughput as transaction volume grows toward the 27M monthly target. The 9-month duration of this proposal is also deliberate: it gives the ecosystem a structured runway to decentralize maintenance work itself, with greater distribution planned in subsequent cycles.
What Cardano looks like when this passes
Nine months from now, if this passes, Cardano will have operated at 99.98% uptime or better. Every release from Q3 2026 through Q1 2027 will have shipped fully tested and signed off. The Cardano Blueprint will continue to grow as the implementation-independent specification it is. Governance tooling – guardrails scripts, CLI, API – will have remained fully operational throughout one of the most active governance periods in Cardano’s history.
This directly supports Cardano’s 2030 KPIs – monthly transactions, active users, and uptime reliability – by preserving the foundation they depend on.
Maintenance is continuous and non-discretionary. The cost of interruption is always higher than continuity.
What we’re asking DReps to do
Review the full proposal – with its budget breakdown, delivery scope, and governance architecture – and cast your vote on GovTool.
The vote window closes on May 24, 2026, at 10:45 pm UTC.
To learn even more about the proposal, listen to this X Space.
