Input Output, the private engineering company 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 coffers.
The company on Tuesday submitted nine proposals totaling $46.8 million for 2026, up from $97.5 million in 2025. Several of the proposals are aimed at scaling Cardano to increase its transaction processing capacity and expand into Bitcoin DeFi.
Cardano, like most major blockchains, maintains a shared pool of funds funded by network fees, which community representatives vote to allocate to development work. Input Output has historically been the largest recipient, because this is where most of the engineers who build the underlying software work.
The reduced demand is the first concrete step in a plan to gradually reduce that dependency. Input Output said it now wants to reduce its annual request every year until the company can support itself on its own revenues, with community funds instead going to a wider range of smaller tech 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 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 larger funds 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, this would take Cardano from a relatively slower chain to one that rivals Solana and the fastest Ethereum Layer-2 networks in terms of throughput alone. A test version of Leios is planned for 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, bitcoin holders could borrow through Cardano and earn returns on their assets without handing over custody to a centralized intermediary. Pogun’s credit component is scheduled 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 leads and ties funding to delivery milestones rather than committing funds up front. Imagine paying a contractor in stages as different parts of a house are completed, rather than having to hand over the entire budget at the start of construction.
Voting starts Tuesday and runs until May 24. The decisions are made by approximately 1,000 elected representatives, known as DReps, who represent ADA holders in the same way that proxy representatives do in a publicly traded company. Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Input Output, will release a video this week addressing the matter directly to these delegates.
The vote will test whether Cardano’s board, 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 passed, but in the meantime the Cardano Foundation has taken over the grant-funding arm of the project and Intersect, the governing body organizing this vote, has taken on management of Cardano’s core software. Both shifts mean that alternatives to Input Output now exist in a way that did not exist when the previous votes went through.
Meanwhile, Input Output also mentioned progress in the ecosystem in its publication. 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 network usage, rose from $137.5 million to $142.7 million over the same period.
Whether the entire slate is adopted, partially funded, or completely reformed by DReps will be a signal of the extent to which the Cardano community’s thinking has changed now that the tools exist to finance development without input-output.