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 fund.
The company submitted nine proposals totaling $46.8 million for 2026 on Tuesday, down 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 that community representatives vote to allocate to development work. Input Output has historically been the biggest beneficiary because it employs most of the engineers who build the underlying software.
The reduced issue is the first concrete step in a plan to phase out this addiction. Input Output said it now aims to reduce its annual request each year until the company can sustain itself on its own revenue, with community funding instead going to a wider 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 like VacuumLabs and Midgard Labs that focus on specific layers of the Cardano software.
Scaling and bitcoin DeFi
The nine proposals are grouped into two themes. The majors are funding a consensus upgrade called Leios, which Input Output claims will increase Cardano’s transaction processing capacity by 10 to 65 times, targeting more than 1,000 transactions per second.
For context, it would move Cardano from a relatively slower chain to one that rivals Solana and the fastest Ethereum layer-2 networks on throughput alone. Leios is planned for a test release in June and full implementation 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 let bitcoin holders borrow and earn returns on their holdings through Cardano without giving custody to a centralized intermediary. Pogun’s lending component is targeted for public release in the second quarter.
Smaller proposals cover performance improvements to Cardano’s smart contract engine, security testing infrastructure, developer tools, and extended API services.
Each proposal names specific delivery tracks and ties funding to delivery milestones rather than releasing money up front. Imagine paying a contractor in stages as different parts of a house are completed, rather than handing over the full budget at the start of construction.
Voting opens on Tuesday and runs through May 24. The decisions are made by about 1,000 elected delegates known as DReps, who represent ADA holders in the same way that proxies do in a publicly traded company. Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Input Output, is scheduled to release a video this week making the case directly to these delegates.
The vote will test whether Cardano’s management, which has expanded significantly over the past two years, treats Input Output like any other grant applicant or continues to approve its requests largely on the basis of deference.
Last year’s $97.5 million proposal was passed, but in the meantime, the Cardano Foundation has taken over the grant-funding arm of the project, and Intersect, the governance organization running this vote, has taken on the management of Cardano’s core software. Both shifts mean that alternatives to Input Output now exist in a way that they didn’t when previous votes went through.
Meanwhile, Input Output also cited progress in the ecosystem 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, rose from $137.5 million to $142.7 million in the same period.
Whether the full board survives, is partially funded, or completely reshaped by DReps will signal how much the mindset of the Cardano community has changed now that the tools to fund non-input-output development exist.
