At a glance
- We have around 17x fewer developers than Ethereum, and the gap keeps increasing by 3x our TOTAL number of developers year by year, while our numbers stay virtually the same. If we keep with this trend, we won't be able to compete.
- Cardano has the foundations and the capability, but fragmented documentation, unmaintained tools and libraries, and no clear onboarding path mean developers arrive to a disjointed and scattered ecosystem. Building is too hard, so most abandon or switch to a different blockchain.
- The fix is simple to state and hard to execute: consolidate and align resources, create a single compelling starting point, and smooth the journey. If we get that right, we anticipate 30%+ acceleration in developer growth.
- This six-month, 3.6M ada initiative will make building on Cardano easier, with a one-command project setup, an audit-ready smart contracts library, a unified developer portal, and improvements to existing community tooling. All shipping by the end of Q4 2026, with a final hackathon to evaluate the results.
- Built with tight AI integration for developers coming to Cardano from EVM, Web2, and technical-entrepreneur backgrounds, the goal is to go from zero to a working DApp on testnet in under two weeks.
- Shaped by direct feedback from 109 Cardano developers and by existing community work from Mesh, TxPipe, the Cardano Foundation, and others. We’re building with the community, for the community.
- IO is leading and delivering. We're coordinating with Intersect's Developer Advocate Program and exploring a technology partnership with TxPipe. Payments are milestone-gated via Intersect's treasury reserve smart contract framework with third-party assurance.
- I'm asking DReps to vote yes. The full proposal and measurement methodology are linked at the bottom.
Cardano needs to grow its builder base
Cardano's fundamentals are strong. The protocol is secure, governance is live and maturing, and the community has produced strong tooling, documentation, and libraries over the years.
But Cardano is losing the fight for developers. We have around 17x fewer developers than Ethereum, and the gap keeps widening by 3x our total number of developers every year, while our numbers stay virtually the same.
A major reason builders don’t choose Cardano is that the potential upside isn't high enough to justify the onboarding and development costs they must incur to build their businesses. Some things are out of our control, others are not – such as reducing the cost of building on Cardano. So, how can we do that?
What's missing is aligned tooling, consolidated documentation, and a clear starting point for every new developer. I’ve been building on and teaching other developers how to build on Cardano for almost 5 years now. Over the years, there have been several waves of developers who wanted to try building something and needed different things.
At first, they needed more features. Cardano smart contracts weren’t powerful or flexible enough for them. We solved that problem by improving the on-chain capabilities themselves.
Then, there were no learning resources available, so we created the Plutus Pioneer Program, the Cardano Developer Course, delivered courses at universities, held countless hackathons, and created many other resources. The information was there, but the tooling was too difficult to use.
Thanks to the community, we now have amazing tooling and resources that solve the usability problem and tailor to each specific kind of developer. We have tooling for JavaScript, Python, Scala, Rust, Go, C#, Haskell, and more! However, this generated a new problem. We now have dozens of tools, libraries, and documentation sites that do and talk about the same thing, but with different tools. There’s no clear set of tools, many different entry points, and some tools are better maintained than others. For an experienced Cardano developer, it’s no issue. But for a newcomer who doesn’t know the ecosystem, it’s too much friction.
This proposal aims to address the last coordination problem in the best possible way. Instead of forcing the community to use what we think is the best tool, we’ll provide an easy way to onboard new developers that harmonizes and works for all, regardless of their preferred tech stack. A thin layer that provides everything they need to know at a glance, sets up everything, and provides thorough documentation independent of your preferred tech stack.
I find this to be an elegant solution, since it gives great community tooling builders a front seat at the onboarding stage independent of their marketing budget, it allows them to have up to date documentation in the Developer Portal with minimal maintenance, and newcomers (and their AI agents) will always have a single place they need to go that will always have functioning, up to date, and widely used tooling.
A focused, six-month delivery with a team of experts
The scope has been kept tight: six months, one delivery team, a defined set of artifacts. Under the proposal recently put to the community, I'll lead the team as product manager, targeting the developer experience of Cardano as a whole as the ‘product’. Plus, the IO team will have the support of a TypeScript and web engineer, a Cardano DApp development expert, a Rust engineer, and a developer relations specialist.
The Cardano developer experience is a shared challenge, and collaboration across the ecosystem is key to addressing it. We coordinated with Intersect's Developer Advocate Program and the Cardano Foundation team responsible for the Developer Portal to align on ecosystem-wide developer support throughout 2026. We’re also exploring a technology partnership with TxPipe to expand delivery capacity and bring specialist developer-tooling expertise to Cardano. Our collaborators were chosen for their direct experience with Cardano tooling and onboarding, as well as their alignment with the developer community.
The strategy was shaped by viewpoints from over 100 Cardano developers, conversations with the teams that maintain developer-related tooling, and meetings at Intersect’s Developer Experience Working Group. The Developer HUB work will improve the existing Developer Portal in coordination with the Cardano Foundation, Intersect, and community members, and the tooling-related items will improve the usability of existing community tooling.
What gets built, and why it matters
We're shipping three artifacts, plus ecosystem alignment work, that together shorten and improve the builder journey.
cardano-init, the one-command Cardano project setup: A CLI in the spirit of create-react-app or TanStack Builder: pick a stack, and everything is set up, AI-ready, and working out of the box. Plugin-extensible, so any team can add their tooling without touching the internals. Shipping by end-Q3 2026.
ContractsLibrary, audit-ready smart contracts, ready to deploy: At least five on-chain and off-chain contracts covering both building blocks and fully-fledged protocols. Developers get a starting point, and the library doubles as grounding material for coding LLMs. Shipping by end-Q4 2026. One of Cardano High Assurance's team proposals will build on top of this by formally proving the properties of these contracts.
Developer HUB, the Developer Portal restructured for onboarding: A canonical entry point optimized for the onboarding of three personas (EVM/blockchain developer, Web2 developer, technical entrepreneur), with CI/CD-maintained code snippets and LLM-ready content. Delivered in coordination with the Cardano Foundation and Intersect. Shipping by end-Q3 2026.
Community collaboration and reactive work. The proposal sets aside the equivalent of 1 FTE for six months, converted into USDCx bounties paid directly to maintainers and contributors of key DevX tooling across the ecosystem. The bounty pool addresses the highest-impact problems — on-chain/off-chain interaction documentation, hard-fork readiness, serialization — with a reactive lane held open for high-ROI work that surfaces through ecosystem coordination.
What Cardano looks like after six months
Here's the picture I'm aiming at. End of Q4 2026: a developer decides to try Cardano for the first time. They arrive at the Developer Portal, the canonical entry point, and find a clear path tailored to where they are coming from. The code snippets on the page work because CI/CD keeps them up to date. The examples are up to date because the content is maintained. LLM coding agents can pull accurate Cardano context because the portal is structured for it.
They run one command, cardano-init, and within minutes, they have a working project scaffolded with their chosen stack. They browse the ContractsLibrary and find a vesting contract, a DEX primitive, a lending building block, a programmable token template, etc. They pick one as their starting point, knowing it has been built to audit-ready quality and that one of Cardano High Assurance's teams is on a path to formally prove its properties.
During the first weeks, which are the hardest for newcomers, they’ll have everything they need to get started and learn what they need to build on Cardano.
Two weeks later, they're deploying their custom MVP to the testnet. Their first sprint is focused on building their product, not on wiring up tooling or figuring out the basics. They ask a question on Discord and get an answer from a developer advocate within hours. Because Outreach work funded by this proposal is turning that question into a documentation PR, the next developer won't need to ask.
So how will we measure success? By the end of Q4 2026, a measurement hackathon will produce hard data on how long onboarding actually takes, how developers rate the experience via a net-promoter score (NPS), and which next steps (if any) are needed to further improve DevX. Due to delayed effects, it will take a few more months for the relative developer growth rate to shift by the targeted 30% or more. That data flows into the next funding milestone, into Intersect's treasury reporting, and to every DRep who wants to see what their vote produced.
This proposal directly advances monthly active users – one of Cardano's core 2030 KPIs – by removing friction in the builder journey and bringing more production-ready DApps into the ecosystem. It sits in Pillar 2: adoption and utility. Each onboarded developer team can bring hundreds to thousands of active users, which compounds MAU growth well beyond the six-month window.
If you want to get a deeper dive into the proposal, please watch my presentation about IO's Developer Experience proposal at this year’s Buidler Fest.
What I'm asking DReps to do
Review the full proposal, engage with the deliverables roadmap, and cast your vote before May 24th. The proposal, budget breakdown, and measurement methodology are available on Govtool.
If you’d like to learn more about the initiative, listen to this X Space on the Cardano experience proposals.
Six months. Three shipped artifacts and improvements to existing ones. Hard data on whether it worked.
