Cardano has spent years being dismissed as an academic exercise - long on research, short on results.
Key Takeaways
Cardano’s nine treasury proposals request $38.9 million for 2026.
The Ouroboros Leios upgrade targets a jump to 200-1,000+ TPS.
Community delegates (DReps) have until May 24, 2026 to vote on all nine proposals.
That narrative is now being tested against a concrete set of deliverables, a compressed timeline, and a governance structure that puts funding decisions in the hands of the community rather than its founders.
In late April 2026, Input Output Global published nine treasury proposals outlining what it wants to build through 2030 and how much it expects the network to pay for it.
The total ask is $38.9 million, which is roughly half of what IOG requested last year. The stated reason is operational self-sufficiency – the organization says it is reducing its dependency on treasury injections as on-chain revenue matures. Whether that framing holds up will depend on whether the underlying technology actually ships on schedule.
The Leios Upgrade and What It Actually Changes
The centerpiece of the roadmap is Ouroboros Leios, a protocol upgrade designed to break the link between transaction endorsement and block production. Under the current architecture, those two functions are coupled, which constrains throughput. Leios introduces a two-tier system where input blocks process transactions in parallel while ranking blocks handle ledger finalization.
Preliminary simulations suggest the change could push Cardano from its current 10 to 15 transactions per second to somewhere between 200 and 1,000 TPS under normal load, with theoretical peaks cited as high as 10,000 TPS in optimized configurations. IOG has requested 62.1 million ADA, approximately $15.8 million at current prices, specifically for Leios-related node upgrades, monitoring infrastructure, and security audits. A public testnet is scheduled for June 2026, with a mainnet launch targeted before the end of the year.
Beyond Speed: The Other Eight Proposals
The proposals do not stop at raw throughput. Babel Fees, one of the nine submissions, would let users pay transaction costs in non-ADA assets such as stablecoins or native tokens, which removes one of the more persistent friction points for users who want to interact with Cardano without first acquiring ADA.
UTXO HD, another component, is an engineering change to keep node operation viable on standard residential hardware as the ledger grows – a practical concern for any network that talks about decentralization while also chasing enterprise scale. And then there is Pogun, an end-to-end Bitcoin DeFi engine that IOG says is designed to route Bitcoin liquidity into Cardano through trust-minimized bridges and credit markets, with a mainnet credit market launch scheduled for Q2 2026.
Van Rossum, Midnight, and the Visa Card
This month also saw the Van Rossum hard fork, which moved Cardano to Protocol Version 11. The upgrade optimized the Plutus smart contract engine and reduced script execution overhead by approximately 25%, according to IOG’s documentation. It is a step that needed to happen before Leios can land, and it gives developers a cleaner foundation to build against ahead of the testnet.
Meanwhile, a separate but related development came on March 31, when the Midnight privacy sidechain went live. Midnight operates as a confidentiality layer with its own token, NIGHT, and launched with institutional validators that include Google Cloud, MoneyGram, and Worldpay.
Charles Hoskinson used the occasion to draw comparisons to Ripple’s XRP, arguing that Midnight’s tokenomics are structured to return value to the broader Cardano ecosystem rather than concentrate it. On April 22, EMURGO and Wirex launched a physical Visa debit card that lets holders spend ADA and more than 680 other assets at standard merchants, offering 8% in crypto rewards. These are not peripheral announcements – they represent the demand-side of the transaction volume IOG is claiming it will reach by 2030.
What the On-Chain Data Shows
The on-chain data heading into the vote period offers some context. As of early April, wallets holding 10 million ADA or more hit a four-month high at 424 wallets, suggesting accumulation from larger holders ahead of the June testnet.
Total value locked in Cardano’s DeFi ecosystem sits around $132 million, which is well below Ethereum and Solana, but analysts have pointed to the market-cap-to-TVL ratio of roughly 66 times as an indicator that ADA holders have not yet rotated into on-chain activity in significant numbers. Whether that represents latent potential or structural indifference is a matter of interpretation.
The 2030 Targets and the Competition
The long-term targets attached to the roadmap include 324 million annual transactions and one million monthly active wallets by 2030, with TVL projected at $3 billion, up from the current $132 million to $500 million range.
ADA price projections from analysts cited in IOG materials range from $1.20 to $5.00 by 2030, against a current price between $0.25 and $0.80. Those numbers carry wide uncertainty, and competing networks including Ethereum’s Layer 2 ecosystem and Solana have not been standing still during the years Cardano spent in research mode.
May 24: The Vote That Decides the Roadmap
The most immediate deadline is May 24, 2026. That is when Delegated Representatives, the governance participants who vote on treasury proposals under Cardano’s current framework, close the voting window on all nine submissions.
For the first time, IOG’s development funding does not get approved by IOG – it gets approved or rejected by the community that holds the network’s governance tokens. The June testnet for Leios will then serve as the first concrete test of whether the technical ambitions in these proposals are being executed on schedule.
