On April 22, 2026, Cardano’s core development company, Input Output Global (hereafter referred to as the core development team), officially submitted nine development proposals for the 2026 fiscal year to the community treasury, requesting a total of $46.8 million—down roughly 52% from the $97.5 million requested in 2025. The voting window is now open, with around 1,000 decentralized representatives set to decide the outcome. Voting closes on May 24.
Rather than aiming for broad coverage, the nine proposals are highly focused on two main tracks: first, the network scaling roadmap centered on the Leios consensus upgrade; second, the Bitcoin DeFi integration plan represented by Pogun. At the same time, the core development team has officially discontinued the Acropolis project and the layered pricing scheme, returning 4.1 million ADA to the treasury for community reallocation. These actions send a clear signal: Cardano’s 2026 theme is "narrowing the scope, focusing on delivery."
As of April 24, 2026, ADA is quoted at $0.2487 on the Gate platform, with a 24-hour trading volume of about $8.8 million and a circulating market cap of approximately $915 million. The price has risen slightly by 0.53% over the past 24 hours.
Key Milestones Review: From Community Rejection to Leios Launch Timeline
Cardano’s ecosystem has long faced a core challenge: deep academic research foundations, but persistent mainnet throughput limits that constrain the scale of DeFi and institutional-grade applications. Cardano currently processes about 800,000 transactions per month. The core development team’s consensus proposal outlines a vision for 2030 to boost this figure to over 27 million transactions per month—a leap of more than 30 times the current scale.
The path to this goal has seen several adjustments in recent years. Since 2025, Cardano has completed a series of key governance upgrades, with the decentralized representative system maturing and the community showing stronger accountability in treasury fund allocation. In early April 2026, a $3.5 million conference sponsorship proposal jointly initiated by EMURGO and the Cardano Foundation was overwhelmingly rejected by the community, with 93% voting against. This event signaled a sharp decline in tolerance for "non-core expenditures."
Shortly after, on April 8, the core development team announced the discontinuation of the Acropolis project and returned related treasury funds, clearly refocusing R&D resources on higher-priority frameworks like Leios. On April 22, the nine proposals were formally submitted, marking the final stage of Cardano’s 2026 roadmap for community review and voting.
Four-Dimensional Data Perspective: Strategic Choices Behind $46.8 Million
Treasury Application Comparison Across Four Dimensions
To provide a clear view of the core development team’s strategic shift in 2026, here’s a side-by-side comparison across four dimensions over two years:
| Comparison Dimension | 2025 | 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Number of Proposals | Not disclosed | 9 | — |
| Total Requested Amount | $97.5 million | $46.8 million | -52% |
| Core Upgrade Focus | Multi-track | Leios + Pogun | Narrowed focus |
| Treasury Refund Amount | — | 4.1 million ADA | — |
Data source: core development team public proposal documents
Leios Technical Metrics Breakdown
Leios represents more than a routine protocol upgrade for Cardano—it’s a fundamental overhaul of the underlying consensus structure. Cardano’s current transaction processing capacity is about 10 to 15 TPS. Leios introduces a dual-layer architecture—input blocks process transactions in parallel, while ranking blocks handle final confirmation—which could boost throughput to the 200–1,000 TPS range, with theoretical peaks up to 10,000 TPS under optimized conditions. That’s a 10x to 65x improvement.
Within the nine proposals, the core development team has allocated 62.1 million ADA (approximately $15.8 million) specifically for Leios-related node upgrades, monitoring infrastructure, and security audits. This is the largest single funding request among the nine proposals.
Other proposals cover developer experience optimization, improvements to the Plutus smart contract engine, Babel Fees economic model upgrades (allowing users to pay transaction fees with assets other than ADA), Layer 2 network routes such as Hydra and Midgard, and the Pogun Bitcoin DeFi gateway.
Development Progress Fact Check
There are some noteworthy facts regarding Leios’s current progress. According to the core development team’s public tracker, Leios is still in the "mid-development phase"—the specification documentation is largely complete, but the testnet progress is only about 24%. This creates tension with the "June testnet launch, year-end mainnet deployment" timeline: roughly 76% of testnet development must be completed in less than two months to avoid delays. Thus, while "year-end mainnet" remains the official target, achieving it depends on the density of upcoming technical breakthroughs and collaborative efficiency.
Public Debate: Delivery Focus vs. Motivation Doubts—Both Sides’ Logic
Supporters: Focused Signals Are Strategic Moves
The core development team’s decision to halve its funding request is uncommon in the crypto industry. Supporters argue this marks Cardano’s shift from "research-driven" to "output-driven." The team’s proposal statement makes clear that they aim to gradually reduce reliance on treasury funds, ultimately covering development costs entirely through self-generated revenue.
Redirecting resources from projects like Acropolis to the single priority of Leios is seen as a substantive response to previous criticism about "scattered efforts lacking scalable delivery."
Analysts also note that the reduced funding request may free up significant treasury capital for other ecosystem projects—such as dApp incubation, marketing, and independent research grants—potentially easing concerns about the treasury being dominated by the core development team.
Critics: Execution Risks and Motivation Debates
Critics raise clear, well-founded concerns. The greatest technical worry centers on Leios’s development progress: with only 24% of the testnet complete, meeting the June deadline is far from certain. Any delays on critical paths could push mainnet deployment into 2027.
Governance disputes run deeper. Some decentralized representatives have publicly stated they will vote against certain proposals, citing concerns that treasury funds are being funneled to external fund structures instead of directly into transparent, native Cardano chain mechanisms. Such arrangements are seen as lacking oversight and potentially undermining community visibility into fund flows.
Additionally, there are varied interpretations of the motivation behind the "halved funding request." One cautious view suggests this doesn’t necessarily mean the core development team’s commercial revenues are sufficient to sustain operations. Instead, it may reflect a preemptive risk management strategy amid rising community governance participation and stricter treasury approvals—shrinking the request to boost approval odds. Whether driven by strategic foresight or practical pressure, this stance has become a key narrative variable in the current vote.
Ripple Effects: Treasury Governance, Layer 1 Competition, and Developer Ecosystem
Cardano’s roadmap overhaul has implications far beyond its own ecosystem, warranting examination from three angles.
First, treasury governance as a benchmark. Cardano’s on-chain treasury and decentralized representative voting remain the largest decentralized fund allocation experiment among proof-of-stake chains. When the community rejects a $3.5 million conference sponsorship with a 93% vote, and the core developer slashes its request to $46.8 million for community approval, this entire governance process offers a valuable real-world reference for other on-chain governance projects. The boundaries of treasury authority, standards for reasonable expenditure, and the balance of power between developers and the community—all are more concretely illustrated in this Cardano vote than ever before.
Second, differentiated positioning in Layer 1 competition. Unlike chains that rely on massive token incentives to scale quickly, Cardano’s roadmap opts for a cold-start, deep-tech approach: fundamentally restructuring the consensus layer to solve throughput bottlenecks, rather than relying on Layer 2 quick fixes. If Leios is successfully delivered by year-end, Cardano will have the technical foundation to compete directly with Ethereum, Solana, and others in DeFi, real-world asset tokenization, and enterprise applications. But if delayed, this window could be squeezed by concurrent scaling upgrades from other chains.
Third, a turning point for the developer ecosystem. Internal research by the core development team describes Cardano’s current developer experience as "fragmented," with high entry barriers leading to significant developer attrition. The proposals include a six-month developer tooling overhaul, improvements to Plutus formal verification tools, and the creation of the "cardano-init" tool to lower onboarding hurdles. The goal is practical: enabling developers to start building on Cardano without needing a PhD or three months of setup time. If tooling improvements and mainnet scaling coincide, 2026 could mark a shift from "structural attrition" to "structural growth" for Cardano’s developer ecosystem.
Conclusion
As both controversy and anticipation surround the roadmap, Cardano is writing more than just a history of technical upgrades for a public blockchain. Nine proposals, $46.8 million, and a year-end scaling target—behind these numbers lies a real-time stress test of "how decentralized governance allocates scarce resources." Whether Leios is delivered on schedule, whether the treasury’s contraction yields more precise output, and whether the community can maintain consensus on long-term vision amid disagreements—each outcome will provide an irreplaceable reference for governance practices in the crypto industry. Regardless of the result, the mechanism of entrusting the core roadmap to community voting is already redefining the relationship between developers, token holders, and protocol futures in Layer 1 ecosystems.
