1. A Deliberate Step Toward Financial Independence
Input Output's 2026 treasury submission is notable not just for what it is asking for but for what it signals about the company's long-term relationship with the Cardano ecosystem. The $46.8 million requested across nine proposals represents approximately 48% of the $97.5 million the organization asked for in 2025 — a reduction that Input Output describes as the first step in a multi-year plan to phase out reliance on community treasury funding entirely. The company has stated it intends to shrink its annual ask each successive year until it can sustain operations through its own revenue rather than community allocations, with community treasury funds eventually flowing to a broader set of smaller, specialized engineering teams rather than being concentrated in a single primary developer. By the end of 2026, Input Output expects firms such as VacuumLabs, Midgard Labs, Pragma, and a potential new Haskell engineering entity to be handling most of the technical work it currently carries internally.
The proposals are administered through Intersect, the member-based governance body that now stewards core Cardano software development. Voting by approximately 1,000 elected delegate representatives — known as DReps — opens with the submission and runs through May 24. Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson is expected to release a video this week addressed directly to the DRep community making the case for the proposals.
2. Leios: The 1,000 TPS Upgrade Cardano Has Been Building Toward
The largest and technically most significant proposal in the 2026 slate funds the Leios consensus upgrade — the most ambitious throughput increase in Cardano's history. The proposal frames Leios as the mechanism Cardano needs to grow from approximately 800,000 transactions per month currently toward a 2030 target of over 27 million monthly transactions. In concrete terms, Input Output claims Leios can deliver a 10 to 65 times increase in layer-1 throughput, targeting a sustained processing capacity of more than 1,000 transactions per second. At that level, Cardano would be competitive with Solana and the fastest Ethereum layer-2 networks on raw throughput — a benchmark the network currently falls well short of.
The technical architecture of Leios extends rather than replaces the existing Ouroboros Praos consensus mechanism, which Input Output argues preserves Cardano's security model and decentralization guarantees rather than trading them for speed. The upgrade introduces Endorser Blocks and committee-based validation as the primary mechanisms for increasing processing capacity. A testnet release is scheduled for June 2026, with full mainnet deployment targeted by year-end. Each of these milestones is tied to funding disbursements under the proposal's milestone-gated payment structure, meaning the community retains economic leverage over delivery rather than releasing capital upfront.
3. Pogun: Bringing Bitcoin's Idle Capital Into Cardano's DeFi Ecosystem
The second flagship proposal funds a system called Pogun, which Input Output frames as an "end-to-end Bitcoin DeFi engine" for Cardano. The strategic premise of Pogun is straightforward: Bitcoin is described in the proposal as "the world's most valuable digital asset" that is "almost entirely idle" — sitting in wallets without generating yield, being used as collateral, or participating in any DeFi activity. Pogun's goal is to make Cardano the credit and yield layer for that capital without requiring Bitcoin holders to surrender custody to a centralized intermediary.
The system bundles three components: a non-margin credit market that allows BTC holders to borrow against their holdings, yield infrastructure that enables BTC holders to earn returns without active trading, and a trust-minimized Bitcoin bridge that moves BTC value to Cardano without introducing the centralized custodial risks that have made many existing Bitcoin DeFi bridges vulnerable — as the Kelp DAO exploit dramatically illustrated just the prior weekend. The credit market component is targeted for public mainnet release in the second quarter of 2026, making it one of the nearer-term deliverables in the full proposal slate.
4. The Smaller Proposals: Infrastructure Spanning the Full Stack
Beyond Leios and Pogun, the remaining seven proposals address specific technical layers of Cardano's development stack. Plutus — Cardano's smart contract execution engine — is targeted for approximately a 25% reduction in script preparation overhead through performance optimization work in collaboration with VacuumLabs, which should improve developer experience and reduce transaction costs for complex DeFi operations. Layer-2 scalability work through Hydra and Midgard Labs is included, extending Cardano's off-chain processing capacity alongside the Leios layer-1 upgrade. Formal verification tooling via the High Assurance consortium would improve the security auditing process for Cardano smart contracts — a timely priority given the sector-wide conversation about bridge and DeFi security in the wake of April's exploit wave.
Three protocol-level upgrades are also included in the slate. CIP-159 adds native micro-fee support, enabling economic models for very small transactions that are currently impractical on the network. CPS-23 enables a native multi-asset on-chain treasury — infrastructure for the ecosystem itself to hold diversified asset reserves rather than only ADA. And Babel Fees allows users to pay transaction costs in stablecoins without needing to hold ADA, removing one of the most significant friction points for non-ADA users who want to interact with Cardano-based applications. Blockfrost, the API infrastructure provider that many Cardano developers use to access on-chain data, has a proposal in the slate for maintenance and next-generation indexing scaled to accommodate Leios-level throughput.
5. A Governance Test in Real Time
The vote that runs through May 24 is more consequential than prior Cardano treasury votes for structural reasons. Last year's $97.5 million proposal passed in an environment where Input Output was effectively the only credible recipient of development funding and governance alternatives were limited. In the intervening period, the Cardano Foundation has taken over the project's grant-funding arm, Intersect has assumed stewardship of core software governance, and alternative development organizations have established track records. The DRep community now has the institutional capacity to fund development without Input Output if it chooses to do so — and that changed structural context means the 2026 vote will reflect genuine community judgment about whether Input Output's proposals represent the best use of treasury resources, rather than a default approval.
The milestone-gated payment structure attached to each proposal is a deliberate response to that governance evolution. By tying disbursements to specific deliverables rather than releasing capital upfront, Input Output is accepting accountability mechanisms that approximate how any other grant recipient would be treated by a sophisticated funding body. Whether the full slate passes, is partially funded, or is significantly restructured by the DRep vote will be read as a signal about how Cardano's community-driven governance model has matured — and whether the transition away from Input Output dependency is ahead of, behind, or on schedule.