Cardano builder seeks smaller funding slice of $46.8 million for scaling and Bitcoin DeFi
The engineering organization behind Cardano submitted nine proposals totaling $46.8 million for the 2026 voting cycle, down from $97.5 million last year.
What to know:
- Input Output, the main engineering firm behind Cardano, has cut its 2026 funding request from the community treasury to $46.8 million, about half of last year’s $97.5 million ask, as it begins phasing out reliance on community money.
- The company is seeking support for nine proposals centered on a major consensus upgrade called Leios, which it says could boost Cardano’s throughput to more than 1,000 transactions per second, and Pogun, a system designed to bring Bitcoin-based decentralized finance to the network.
- A vote by roughly 1,000 elected delegates runs through May 24 and will test whether Cardano’s expanded governance treats Input Output like any other grant applicant now that alternative development and funding structures are in place.
Cardano, like most major blockchains, maintains a shared pool of money funded by network fees, which community representatives vote to allocate toward development work. Input Output historically has been the largest recipient because it employs most of the engineers building the underlying software.
The reduced ask is the first concrete step in a plan to phase out that dependency. Input Output said it now aims to shrink its annual request each year until the company can sustain itself on its own revenue, with community funds going instead to a broader set of smaller 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 firms such as VacuumLabs and Midgard Labs that focus on specific layers of the Cardano software.
