Input Output, the private engineering firm that built and continues to develop the Cardano blockchain, is seeking about half the funding it requested last year from the project’s community treasury.
The company on Tuesday submitted nine proposals totaling $46.8 million by 2026, up from $97.5 million in 2025. Several of the proposals focus on scaling Cardano to increase its transaction processing capacity and expand into Bitcoin DeFi.
Cardano, like most major blockchains, maintains a shared pool of money funded by network fees, which community representatives vote to allocate to development work. Historically, Input Output has been the biggest recipient because it employs most of the engineers who create the underlying software.
Reducing demand is the first concrete step in a plan to gradually eliminate that dependence. Input Output said it now aims to reduce its annual request each year until the company can support itself on its own revenue, with community funds going to a broader set of smaller engineering groups.
By the end of 2026, Input Output expects smaller, more specialized teams to take over most of the work it currently does in-house, including companies like VacuumLabs and Midgard Labs that focus on specific layers of Cardano software.
Scaling and bitcoin DeFi
The nine proposals are grouped into two themes. The major is funding a consensus upgrade called Leios, which Input Output says will increase Cardano’s transaction processing capacity by 10 to 65 times, with a goal of over 1,000 transactions per second.
For context, that would move Cardano from a relatively slower chain to one competitive with Solana and the faster Ethereum Layer 2 networks in performance alone. Leios is scheduled for a trial in June and full deployment by the end of the year.
The second flagship proposal funds a system called Pogun, which aims to bring Bitcoin-based decentralized finance to Cardano. In practice, it would allow bitcoin holders to borrow and earn returns on their holdings through Cardano without handing over custody to a centralized intermediary. Pogun’s credit component is scheduled to be made public in the second quarter.
The smaller proposals cover performance improvements to Cardano’s smart contract engine, security testing infrastructure, development tools, and expanded API services.
Each proposal names specific delivery lines and ties funding to delivery milestones rather than releasing money up front. Imagine paying a contractor in stages as different parts of a home are completed, rather than giving them the full estimate at the start of construction.
Voting begins Tuesday and runs through May 24. Decisions are made by approximately 1,000 elected delegates known as DReps, who represent ADA holders in the same way that representatives do at a publicly traded company. Charles Hoskinson, founder of Input Output, is scheduled to release a video this week making the case directly to those delegates.
The vote will test whether Cardano’s governance, which has expanded significantly over the past two years, treats Input Output like any other grant applicant or continues to approve its applications largely on a deferential basis.
Last year’s $97.5 million proposal was approved, but in the meantime, the Cardano Foundation has taken over the project’s grant funding arm, and Intersect, the governance organization leading this vote, has taken over management of Cardano’s core software. Both changes mean that alternatives to Input-Output now exist in a way that did not exist in previous votes.
Meanwhile, Input Output also cited progress in the ecosystem in its statement. A new Cardano stablecoin, USDCx, reached 14.6 million tokens in circulation within weeks of its launch. Total assets deposited on Cardano, a common measure of a network’s usage, increased from $137.5 million to $142.7 million during the same period.
Whether the entire listing is approved, partially funded, or completely reworked by DReps will indicate how much the Cardano community’s thinking has changed now that the tools exist to fund development without inputs and outputs.
