Input Output, the private engineering firm that built and continues to develop the Cardano blockchain, is seeking about half of the funding it requested last year from the project’s community treasury.
The company on Tuesday submitted nine proposals totaling $46.8 million for 2026, up from $97.5 million in 2025. Several of the proposals focus on scaling Cardano to increase its transaction processing capacity and expanding 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 beneficiary 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 this dependence. Input Output said it now aims to reduce its annual demand each year until the company can support itself with its own income, with community funds instead going to a wider set of small engineering groups.
By the end of 2026, Input Output expects smaller, more specialized teams to take on most of the work it currently does in-house, including companies such as 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 largest are funding a consensus upgrade called Leios, which Input Output says will increase Cardano’s transaction processing capacity by 10 to 65 times, targeting more than 1,000 transactions per second.
For context, this would move Cardano from a relatively slower chain to one competitive with Solana and the fastest layer 2 Ethereum networks on throughput alone. Leios is expected to undergo testing 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, this would allow Bitcoin holders to borrow and earn a yield on their holdings through Cardano without entrusting custody to a centralized intermediary. The loan component of Pogun is expected to be made public in the second quarter.
Smaller proposals cover performance improvements to Cardano’s smart contract engine, security testing infrastructure, developer tools, and expanded API services.
Each proposal names specific delivery tracks and ties funding to delivery milestones rather than releasing money upfront. Imagine paying a contractor in stages as different parts of a house are completed, instead of handing them the entire budget at the start of construction.
Voting opens Tuesday and runs until May 24. Decisions are made by approximately 1,000 elected delegates known as DReps, who represent ADA holders much like proxy representatives do in a publicly traded company. Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Input Output, is expected to release a video this week making his case directly to these delegates.
The vote will test whether Cardano’s governance, which has expanded significantly over the past two years, treats inputs like any other grant applicant or continues to approve its requests largely on a deferential basis.
Last year’s $97.5 million proposal passed, but in the meantime, the Cardano Foundation took over the funding arm of the project, and Intersect, the governance organization handling that vote, assumed management of Cardano’s core software. These two changes mean that alternatives to IO now exist in a way that did not exist in previous votes.
Meanwhile, Input Output also cited the ecosystem’s progress in its release. 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 full list is adopted, is partially funded, or is entirely reshaped by DReps will indicate how much the Cardano community’s thinking has changed now that the tools to fund development without I/O exist.
