Nine IO treasury proposals are now with the community for governance review. Each supports a specific body of work with clear ownership, timelines, and a direct link to Cardano’s 2030 vision.
Taken together, they reflect two priorities that define this year’s slate: scalability and decentralization. IO is asking for significantly less funding than last year - $46.8m this year, compared with $97.5m last year - while focusing on delivering the final pieces needed to help Cardano scale and transition to a broader, more self-sufficient contributor ecosystem.
These proposals also reflect an evolving delivery model. IO is leading and funding this work in 2026 while actively exploring collaboration with selected specialist partners to broaden participation in maintaining and advancing Cardano’s core infrastructure. This approach supports a decentralized, resilient ecosystem in which multiple teams contribute with shared accountability.
This is not intended to be a permanent funding model. Each year, the goal is to ask for less from the treasury as more delivery capability moves into a wider network of organizations. Voting this year helps fund final delivery and supports Cardano’s continued decentralization.
What follows provides an overview of each proposal and the outcomes it is designed to deliver.
1. Developer experience
Led by Robertino Martinez
A six-month program to streamline Cardano’s developer tooling, documentation, and onboarding, targeting a 30%+ improvement in developer growth rate.
Cardano’s security model and native asset support have always attracted serious builders. However, its powerful (yet challenging) UTXO model and fragmented tooling ecosystem have never made Cardano the easiest of lifts for new developers.
As Cardano's governance model continues to mature and new critical integrations (like USDCx, Pyth, and more) become available, more developers are taking notice. And what turns that interest into shipped products – and the potential for growth these bring – is the experience between 'I want to build here' and 'my DApp is live.'
This proposal funds a focused program to address exactly that: improved SDK tooling, consolidated documentation, better error handling and diagnostics, and smoother pathways from prototype to production. The work connects directly to CBOR standardization and contract specification languages.
CBOR makes data smaller, faster, and more reliable for computers to process. This helps developers build and run applications on Cardano more efficiently and at lower cost, improving their experience throughout the entire build lifecycle.
The goal is measurable: reduced time to first DApp, improved developer satisfaction, and higher conversion from onboarding to active deployment. Consolidating tooling, strengthening documentation, and shortening the path from first contact to a working application will compound across the ecosystem. Each successful deployment becomes a signal that encourages the next developer to build.
To further streamline and smooth the developer journey, primary stewardship of developer relations will transition to the Cardano Foundation by the end of 2026. The Foundation's deep community reach and global presence make it the natural long-term home for this work. IO is delivering this year's program while ensuring a strong expansion of relationships, processes, and institutional knowledge.
Each developer who ships successfully becomes a signal to the next one.
2. Cardano Upgrades
Led by Alexey Kuleshevich
Three platform-level enhancements that expand Cardano's economic models and remove onboarding friction: account address upgrades, multi-asset treasury, and Babel Fees.
Three platform-level upgrades aim to expand what builders can do on Cardano: native micro-fee support lets wallets and DApps monetize lightweight user actions at negligible cost, a multi-asset treasury diversifies the protocol's financial reserves beyond ada, and Babel fees complete the picture by letting users pay transaction fees in any native token. Together, these upgrades open up product categories and revenue models that are not yet possible on the network.
Multi-asset micro fees (CIP-159) enable wallets and DApps to charge for lightweight user actions in any native asset at negligible cost. The work includes prerequisite LedgerHD changes and targets delivery by Q4 of 2026.
The multi-asset treasury (CPS-23) enables the on-chain treasury to hold diversified assets beyond ada, strengthening the protocol's long-term financial sustainability.
Babel fees build on the nested transactions framework being delivered in the 2025 proposal cycle, enabling transaction fees to be paid in native tokens other than ada and opening the door to seamless onboarding.
3. Consensus
Led by Carlos Lopez De Lara and delivered in collaboration with Intersect and a multi-vendor consortium
Delivering sustainable throughput capacity at the consensus layer. Ships Leios.
This is the largest technical initiative in the portfolio. It delivers two consensus-layer upgrades that together address Cardano's throughput and settlement speed at the protocol level.
Leios is the primary layer 1 scaling solution. It delivers sustainable throughput capacity through a new consensus mechanism. The Leios testnet is shipping soon, with mainnet targeted by the end of 2026, and it is considered essential for meeting the 2030 monthly transaction targets. The consortium includes Tweag (specialized engineering), TxPipe (infrastructure and tooling), and Intersect (coordination and governance oversight for the hard fork process). It also reflects the broader delivery direction for Cardano: collaborating with specialist partners to deliver critical infrastructure in a more decentralized way.
4. Layer 2 scalability
Jointly led by Sharan Koneria and Midgard Labs
Delivering production-ready L2 infrastructure through Hydra production hardening, Midgard mainnet launch, and shared L2-agnostic primitives, in partnership with Input Output and Midgard Labs.
Cardano's layer 1 excels in security and decentralization, but high-performance use cases like real-time DeFi, AI micropayments, and gaming demand sub-second finality and throughput beyond the capacity of any single base layer. Builders are already choosing platforms based on these capabilities, making layer 2 infrastructure an immediate competitive necessity rather than a future nice-to-have. Layer 2 solutions don't compete with the base layer — they unlock applications that are technically impossible on-chain, keeping that activity within Cardano's ecosystem instead of losing it to competitors.
Pillar 1: Layer 2-agnostic infrastructure
The shared primitives every Cardano layer 2 needs: a viable data availability strategy, compact transaction format, KZG/polynomial commitment Plutus built-ins for state proofs, and a credibly neutral layer 2 interoperability standard. This work benefits Hydra, Midgard, zkFold, Midnight, and any future Cardano layer 2 solution.
Pillar 2: Hydra production hardening
Hydra has crossed from research to market validation. Delta DeFi, Masumi, and Midgard itself are building on it now. This pillar funds the critical engineering needed to move from a well-tested research protocol to production infrastructure: memory optimization, network performance under load, operational tooling, and pre-built reference stacks for DeFi use cases.
Pillar 3: Midgard optimistic rollup
Midgard is Cardano's first truly permissionless optimistic rollup, made uniquely possible by the EUTXO architecture. Unlike Ethereum layer 2 solutions that still operate as custodial multisigs without working fraud proofs, Midgard uses Cardano's local UTXO state to enable single-party fraud proofs in a single layer 1 transaction. The testnet is targeting a release in Q3/Q4 2026.
Hydra and Midgard are powerful complementary solutions. They do not ‘compete’. Hydra is purpose-built for known-party, high-frequency environments. Midgard is purpose-built for open, permissionless applications. Together, they give Cardano a credible answer across the full range of high-performance use cases.
A dedicated layer 2 scaling entity is being established to take on long-term stewardship of Cardano's layer 2 infrastructure by the end of 2026. IO is looking for funding to deliver and ensure a seamless expansion of engineering, codebases, and roadmaps.
5. Cardano High Assurance
Led by Stefano Leone
Delivering automated formal verification and a unified developer toolkit for secure, verifiable smart contract development on Cardano.
Cardano leads the blockchain industry in formal verification: the ability to prove mathematically that a smart contract does exactly what it is supposed to do. This proposal extends that capability from a specialist discipline to an everyday part of building on Cardano.
The outcome is compounding. Developers can ship faster with greater confidence and fewer vulnerabilities. Fewer exploits means less lost capital, stronger user trust, and a platform that serious teams and institutions are more willing to build on. Over time, this shifts Cardano from being perceived as ‘high assurance in theory’ to ‘high assurance in practice’ at scale.
Four workstreams will deliver it: a universal annotation language connected to CIP-57 and EasySM, a DApp-level verification tooling, an AI-assisted annotation that automates what was previously a manual process, and a pre-configured containerized development environment that removes the setup barrier entirely.
6. Maintenance
Led by Michael Karg, IO
Core platform maintenance, support, and operational infrastructure for the Cardano network.
Cardano runs billions of dollars in value across thousands of applications globally. This proposal funds the sustained engineering that keeps it performing.
Bug fixes, security patches, performance tuning, node operator support, reduced node footprint, and blueprints implementation. Partnership discussions are underway with Bcryptic, Dquadrant, and Quviq for additional engineering and quality assurance capacity.
It is the largest line item in the portfolio because every other proposal depends on it. Every stake pool operator, every DApp, every transaction on Cardano runs on what this team delivers.
A new dedicated entity will gain stewardship of Cardano's Haskell engineering capability by the end of 2026. The codebase, roadmap, and engineering continuity are preserved. IO is funding this year's work and ensuring a strong foundation for the new entity.
7. Plutus
Led by Ziyang Liu and delivered in partnership with VacuumLabs
Making Cardano's smart-contract platform easier to build on, cheaper to run, and more rigorously verified, delivered as a co-venture between Input Output and VacuumLabs.
Advancing the Plutus platform through developer experience improvements, execution efficiency, and formal specification is a key part of finishing the job on Cardano’s core smart contract layer — ensuring it can scale while remaining secure and accessible to a broader set of developers.
Plutus is Cardano's smart contract platform. Three workstreams within a Plutus proposal define the enhancements that are coming next, with a focus on performance, security, and usability.
Three areas matter most for governance review.
- Plutus capabilities and primitives: casing on the built-in Data type, a set of new powerful primitives enabling cross-chain interoperability, ZK proofs, and efficient list and value operations; investigation into removal of scope check and laziness in UPLC. Together, these changes reduce execution costs and expand what developers can build on Cardano.
- Formal specification, correctness, and security: a property-based conformance testing framework that extends the current test suite, which supports node diversity by enabling alternative Plutus evaluators to verify correctness against the canonical implementation; a systematic security and correctness audit of the security-critical code (such as the Plutus evaluator and costing); and formalization of programmatic built-in types and functions in the Plutus metatheory.
- Developer tooling and security: a new compiler and optimizer architecture that improves code optimization, provides clearer source-level error messages, and reduces boilerplate. It also simplifies setting up the development environment, removing the need for tools like Nix or manual dependency installation, and shortening the path from first contact to a working application.
Stewardship of the Plutus smart contract stack will transition to VacuumLabs by the end of 2026. This reflects the broader direction for Cardano: moving from a single delivery organization to a network of specialist partners contributing to core infrastructure.
8. Pogun
Led by Omer Husain
The end-to-end Bitcoin DeFi solution for Cardano.
Bitcoin is the world's most valuable digital asset, and it is almost entirely idle. Pogun positions Cardano to capture the largest open market opportunity in crypto: becoming the dominant credit and liquidity layer for bitcoin.
Three integrated components form a single economic engine. A non-margin credit market launches on mainnet in Q2 2026: fully on-chain, oracle-free, with transferable bond tokens that lay the foundation for the first secondary debt market on Cardano. A yield DApp follows in Q3, opening Cardano's credit infrastructure to liquid capital. A BitVM-powered trust-minimized bridge completes the stack in Q4, with a 1-of-N security model for institutional-grade Bitcoin custody.
The bridge launches last on purpose: by the time it is live, a working credit market and yield layer are already operational.
The treasury ask is structured as an investment, not a grant. 20% of earnings return to the Cardano treasury until full repayment, followed by 5% in perpetuity on Cardano-related products.
9. Blockfrost
Delivered by the Blockfrost team
Decentralized data infrastructure that scales with Cardano.
Blockfrost serves approximately 90% of all free-tier API traffic on Cardano. For most builders in the ecosystem, it is simply a matter of how they access blockchain data.
This proposal has two components:
- Project Cayley is a next-generation decentralized indexing architecture. Rather than requiring every data provider to index the entire blockchain, Cayley enables SPOs and node operators to participate by indexing only the slices they need. Its modular architecture extends to Bitcoin and other ecosystems, positioning Cardano's data infrastructure as a cross-chain utility. Deliverables are dated: Mandoline indexer MVP in Q2 2026, GraphQL API layer in Q3, Bitcoin extension in Q4.
- The operational subsidy funds the continued running of Blockfrost's community free tier. It covers the engineering team, 24/7 incident response, and the infrastructure required to hold 99.9% uptime.
Open access to blockchain data is a public good. This proposal asks the treasury to share the cost of sustaining it.
What comes next is up to the community
These nine proposals are about more than delivery in 2026. Together, they represent a push to finish key pieces of Cardano’s roadmap while moving toward a more decentralized and self-sufficient model for long-term development.
Every proposal links to a full treasury submission and an open governance discussion thread. Read the details, ask your questions, and vote informed.
