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Input Output, the private engineering company behind the Cardano blockchain, is seeking about half of the funding it requested last year from the project’s community treasury. The company submitted nine proposals totaling $46.8 million for 2026 on Tuesday, down from $97.5 million in 2025.
Cardano, like many major blockchains, uses a shared pool of funds financed by network fees. Community representatives vote on how to allocate that money to development work. Input Output has historically been the largest recipient because it employs most of the engineers building Cardano’s underlying software.
The reduced request is described as an initial step in a plan to phase out that dependency. Input Output said it intends to shrink its annual community request each year until it can sustain itself on its own revenue, with community funds redirected 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 performs in-house, including firms such as VacuumLabs and Midgard Labs, which focus on specific layers of the Cardano software.
The nine proposals fall into two main themes.
The largest funding package supports a consensus upgrade called Leios. Input Output claims Leios will increase Cardano’s transaction processing capacity by 10 to 65 times, targeting more than 1,000 transactions per second.
Input Output says that, by throughput alone, the upgrade would move Cardano toward performance levels comparable with Solana and the fastest Ethereum layer-2 networks. Leios is scheduled for a test release in June, with full deployment by year-end.
The second flagship proposal funds Pogun, intended to bring Bitcoin-based decentralized finance to Cardano. The system would allow bitcoin holders to borrow and earn yield 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 expanded API services.
Each proposal names specific delivery leads and ties funding to delivery milestones rather than releasing money upfront—similar to paying a contractor in stages as parts of a project are completed.
Voting opens Tuesday and runs through May 24. Decisions are made by roughly 1,000 elected delegates known as DReps, who represent ADA holders in a manner similar to proxy representatives in a publicly traded company. Charles Hoskinson, founder of Input Output, is scheduled to release a video this week making the case directly to those delegates.
The vote is expected to test whether Cardano’s governance—expanded significantly over the past two years—treats Input Output like any other grant applicant or continues to approve its requests largely out of deference.
Last year’s $97.5 million proposal passed. Since then, the Cardano Foundation has taken over the project’s grant-funding arm, and Intersect, the governance organization running this vote, has assumed stewardship of core Cardano software. Input Output’s request is therefore being considered in a context where alternatives to Input Output exist in a way they did not when earlier votes were conducted.
Input Output also pointed to ecosystem progress alongside the proposals. A new Cardano stablecoin, USDCx, reached 14.6 million tokens in circulation within weeks of its launch. Over the same period, total assets deposited on Cardano rose from $137.5 million to $142.7 million.
Whether the full slate passes, is partially funded, or is reshaped by DReps will indicate how the Cardano community’s priorities have shifted now that tools to fund development without Input Output exist.
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