Cardano Treasury Withdrawal Proposals

This proposal seeks to catapult the Cardano ecosystem into the global spotlight at TOKEN2049 Singapore, the world’s premier crypto event and the ultimate nexus for industry amplification. The proposal requests **3,303,750 ada** (equivalent to **$792,900 USD**, calculated at an estimated rate of $0.24 per ada) to establish a high-impact, community-centric presence that serves as a dedicated stage for Cardano’s builders. A strategic takeover of Asia's most influential blockchain hub. By securing the second largest booth and a dedicated Cardano stage, we're giving builders something no other ecosystem offers at this scale. Free conference tickets, a stage to present, undeniable access to 25,000+ decision makers, high-value networking, and post-event photography and video coverage, all within the ‘Platinum’ sponsorship. Built by the community, for the builders, ensuring Cardano's technical superiority is matched by an unmissable physical presence. Putting Cardano builders at the forefront. The decision to present this as an independent proposal reflects EMURGO's direct response to community feedback. Following the submission of the combined Cardano Summit 2026 and TOKEN2049 proposal, DReps and community members raised legitimate concerns about the scale of the budget. In response, we have restructured the proposal, lowering the sponsorship from ‘Title’ to ‘Platinum’. This change reduces the overall budget while preserving the core strategic value of the sponsorship, demonstrating a collaborative approach to treasury management. EMURGO, headquartered in Singapore and holding a multi-year partnership with TOKEN2049 spanning 2022 through 2025, is very well-positioned to execute this sponsorship with maximum efficiency and impact.

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**Proposal as pdf: [https://ipnso-com.ipns.dweb.link/?cid=QmUdbgB3eHms52HY4oha5u2V4mrpCZkhBw2AaozeMiz8sL](https://ipnso-com.ipns.dweb.link/?cid=QmUdbgB3eHms52HY4oha5u2V4mrpCZkhBw2AaozeMiz8sL)** One of the primary challenges in decentralizing access to data-providing services such as Blockfrost is the substantial amount of resources required to index the entire Cardano blockchain dataset, even when only a fraction of that data is needed in practice. As Cardano prepares for Leios, the cost of indexing the full blockchain dataset will grow substantially. Today, participating in data-serving infrastructure requires indexing the entire chain. This prices out smaller operators and concentrates infrastructure around fewer providers. Project Cayley introduces decentralized slice indexing — allowing SPOs and node operators to choose which portions of the chain they want to index and serve. This lowers the barrier to participation, reduces infrastructure costs across the ecosystem, and keeps data-serving infrastructure decentralized as the chain scales. Its modular multi-chain architecture further enables developers to access data across Cardano, Midnight, and Bitcoin through a unified API. This proposal funds two components: Project Cayley ($1,000,000) to build the next-generation indexing architecture, and an operational subsidy ($900,000) to maintain the free-tier infrastructure that Blockfrost has funded entirely on its own since inception. **Total ask: ₳7.92M** ($1,900,000 at $0.24/₳).

**Proposal as pdf: [https://ipnso-com.ipns.dweb.link/?cid=QmYfHrmfTKYGK9YR95ewXSwEruEfGPAtpnp1qwoEUekJa7](https://ipnso-com.ipns.dweb.link/?cid=QmYfHrmfTKYGK9YR95ewXSwEruEfGPAtpnp1qwoEUekJa7)** Cardano's current L1 infrastructure — two-hour finality, \~$0.17 per transaction, and \~7–10 TPS, systematically disqualifies it from high-performance verticals such as DeFi, AI agent micropayments, gaming, and consumer payments before a technical evaluation even begins. Upcoming L1 upgrades (Leios, Peras) will strengthen the base layer will not alone meet the requirements of zero-fee or sub-second use cases. Layer 2 infrastructure is the only path to closing this gap in the current cycle. This proposal, led by Input Output in partnership with Midgard Labs, delivers three complementary workstreams: shared L2-agnostic infrastructure (a data availability solution benefiting all current and future Cardano L2s); production hardening of Hydra, including performance optimization, operational tooling, and DeFi reference implementations to support live adopters Delta DeFi and Masumi; and the mainnet launch of Midgard, Cardano's first permissionless optimistic rollup, targeting 10,000+ TPS and sub-$0.01 fees for open-participation applications. Hydra and Midgard are not competing solutions — they address distinct trust models and together cover a far broader range of use cases than either could alone. L2s grow the Cardano ecosystem rather than cannibalize it. Activity on Hydra and Midgard anchors back to L1 through block publication and settlement, generating protocol revenue that would otherwise flow to competing ecosystems. Midgard's architecture additionally includes a mechanism to route a portion of sequencer revenue to the Cardano treasury, creating a durable, non-speculative economic relationship between L2 growth and ecosystem sustainability. By supporting the first wave of production adopters now, this proposal establishes the reference deployments and developer confidence needed to compound ecosystem growth through subsequent cycles.. **Treasury Ask:** ₳10,425,871

*Proposal as pdf: https://ipnso-com.ipns.dweb.link/?cid=bafybeibbrhuis55rl52hsp5rboooobjg4rvq7q5ly2mern7s7f3xcbjzwi* Bitcoin is a \$1.5T asset with virtually no native DeFi infrastructure. The race to become the dominant credit and liquidity layer for BTC is the largest open market opportunity in crypto. Pogun is an end-to-end Bitcoin liquidity and credit engine built to position Cardano as the definitive home of Bitcoin DeFi. Demonstrating our commitment to the proper use of public funds, Pogun will return 20% of EBITDA to the Cardano Treasury until the initial funding is repaid. This will be followed by an ongoing 5% perpetual return. Pogun delivers three integrated components: * **Credit Market (Q2 2026)** - A non-margin peer-to-peer credit market. A fully on-chain, oracle-free lending protocol where collateral is only at risk upon default, not price fluctuations. * **Yield (Q3 2026)** - A deposit-and-earn layer that routes user capital into yield-generating strategies across private credit, RWAs, and structured fixed-income products. * **Bridge (Q4 2026)** - BitVM-powered trust-minimized bridge providing 1-of-N security for institutional-grade Bitcoin custody: bridge BTC to Cardano, borrow against it, and earn without surrendering custody of the underlying asset. To execute this roadmap, this treasury withdrawal requests ₳12.29M (equivalent to \$2.95M USD at a reference rate of \$.24/₳).

**Proposal as pdf: [https://ipnso-com.ipns.dweb.link/?cid=QmYKV7vbX9pwNxst2qWpmtM2k6LRJB4NKKNFJSQyh7zojz](https://ipnso-com.ipns.dweb.link/?cid=QmYKV7vbX9pwNxst2qWpmtM2k6LRJB4NKKNFJSQyh7zojz)** Every feature, upgrade, and innovation proposed for Cardano depends on a stable, secure, and well-maintained platform underneath. This proposal funds that foundation — continuous core maintenance and operational support from Q3 2026 through Q1 2027. Maintenance is not discretionary. It covers nine functional areas that together constitute the full support envelope for Cardano: bug fixing and security reviews, CI/CD and infrastructure operations (including disaster recovery per CIP-135), mainnet and mempool monitoring, the Cardano Blueprint documentation project, open-source community support, systematic performance analysis and optimization, quality assurance and release sign-off, full node release management with L1/L2/L3 incident response, and component maintenance across Plutus Core, DB-Sync, guardrails scripts, APIs, and CLI tools. The value is both protective and enabling. On the protective side, this work ensures network uptime, swift incident resolution, and proactive security hardening through collaboration with the Intersect Security Council. On the enabling side, it delivers the Cardano Blueprint — implementation-independent specifications that lower the barrier for alternative node implementations — and continuous performance optimization that safeguards throughput gains and release quality. IO is collaborating with Ensurable Systems to distribute infrastructure stewardship. Intersect administers funds through milestone-based smart contracts with independent third-party assurance and transparent on-chain dashboards. Unspent funds return to the Treasury. **Treasury Ask:** ₳62,134,630

**Proposal as pdf: [https://ipnso-com.ipns.dweb.link/?cid=QmQBhjELHaMKhYZjwuskHS9NRyvUdiGv69aK8C1H787c5A](https://ipnso-com.ipns.dweb.link/?cid=QmQBhjELHaMKhYZjwuskHS9NRyvUdiGv69aK8C1H787c5A)** Cardano's strongest differentiator is its focus on security and correctness, but the tools that deliver on that promise have so far been the domain of auditors and formal methods experts. This proposal lowers the barrier: it brings automated formal verification, and the full high-assurance toolkit, within reach of every Cardano developer. Two workstreams deliver this. The first extends Blaster, IO's open-source automated formal verification tool, from single-script verification to full DApp-level verification. Blaster has already been used to prove correctness properties on production DApps including Djed and USDCx, and has received strong feedback from the Cardano developer community. Today, extending those results to an entire DApp requires manually decomposing properties and verifying each script in isolation. This proposal removes that manual work by automating verification at the DApp level. It also connects Blaster to four smart contract languages (Aiken, Pebble, Scalus, and Futura), so developers can invoke verification directly from their native toolchain. It delivers a VS Code extension with visual counterexample exploration and inline verification feedback, creates a Common Vulnerability Library with ready-made security templates for major DApp categories, and adds an equivalence checking tool that formally proves two UPLC programs are semantically identical, enabling safe and aggressive optimization. The second workstream delivers a Container-Based Developer Environment (CBDE) that packages the complete high-assurance toolkit into a single-command setup, compressing environment configuration from days into one click. The outcome is a stronger foundation for everyone who depends on Cardano: DeFi users get DApps whose correctness has been mathematically proven, developers get tools that make high-assurance engineering practical, and the ecosystem gets a toolkit maintained collectively by multiple teams. The work is structured as a technical collaboration: IO, Lantr, Harmonic Labs, SAIB, Midgard Labs, TxPipe, and No.Witness Labs each contribute defined components, distributing delivery and long-term maintenance across the ecosystem. Intersect administers funds via milestone-based disbursement with independent oversight, and unspent funds return to the Treasury. **Treasury Ask:** ₳13,078,578

**Proposal as pdf:[https://ipnso-com.ipns.dweb.link/?cid=QmXD6eoaFWrRoubFfvB2vSmLGbhVa66DbM9xw2dH1htRYK](https://ipnso-com.ipns.dweb.link/?cid=QmXD6eoaFWrRoubFfvB2vSmLGbhVa66DbM9xw2dH1htRYK)** This proposal delivers three coordinated initiatives that together expand Cardano's economic models, strengthen long-term Treasury resilience, and remove one of the biggest barriers to mainstream adoption, the requirement to hold ADA before you can transact. Each workstream targets a different dimension of this opportunity. First, CIP-159 Account Address Enhancement upgrades how Cardano handles account addresses. This enables wallets to collect micro-fees (currently blocked by a minimum deposit requirement), makes DeFi applications cheaper for end users, and provides building blocks for Layer 2 scaling solutions to manage user funds. Second, Multi-Asset Treasury begins the design work to let the Cardano Treasury hold stablecoins and other native assets alongside ADA, protecting the funding process from price volatility and opening new financial models for the ecosystem. Finally, Babel Fees lets users pay transaction fees in any Cardano native asset (such as USDC or bridged BTC) instead of requiring ADA, removing a key friction point for new users entering the ecosystem. Together, these initiatives unlock new wallet and DeFi revenue models, strengthen the Treasury's financial position through asset diversification, and reduce friction for users entering Cardano's DeFi ecosystem, where cross-chain bridging alone represents an estimated $1–2 billion annual market. IO is collaborating with Ensurable Systems on delivery. Intersect administers funds via milestone-based smart contracts, with independent oversight, and any unspent funds will be returned to the Treasury. **Treasury Ask:** ₳13,103,039

**Proposal as pdf: [https://ipnso-com.ipns.dweb.link/?cid=Qmd7G7L6xinunTLU9JorPLYyFCLGRarXEn7RngdNYgNH3B](https://ipnso-com.ipns.dweb.link/?cid=Qmd7G7L6xinunTLU9JorPLYyFCLGRarXEn7RngdNYgNH3B)** This proposal strengthens Cardano’s smart contract platform across three critical and closely connected areas: language capabilities, formal correctness, and developer experience. It funds targeted expansion to the Plutus language with new syntactic forms and new primitives to reduce script costs, improve expressiveness, and unlock more efficient contract patterns; formal specification, conformance testing, and structured security review to support correctness as node diversity grows; and a better compiler and tooling experience that lowers setup friction, improves error reporting, and makes smart contract development more accessible. Together, these workstreams make Plutus cheaper to use, more trustworthy to build on, and easier for developers to adopt, helping Cardano support a broader range of applications while also providing stronger foundations for alternative node implementations and other ecosystem tooling. This is a technical collaboration with Input Output and VacuumLabs, distributing Plutus stewardship across expert teams. Intersect administers funds via milestone-based smart contracts with independent oversight. All unspent funds return to the Treasury. **Treasury Ask:** ₳11,877,575

**Proposal as pdf: [https://ipnso-com.ipns.dweb.link/?cid=QmPdBp8QjKaPdYdvwLxzDiCxX85hGx8H6rxbSvTTuLkcx2](https://ipnso-com.ipns.dweb.link/?cid=QmPdBp8QjKaPdYdvwLxzDiCxX85hGx8H6rxbSvTTuLkcx2)** Cardano needs a step change in throughput to meet its 2030 ambitions, and Leios is how it gets there. This proposal funds the path from public testnet to a mainnet-ready release candidate — delivering a 10–65x increase in transaction capacity. Why this scale matters: Cardano's 2030 strategy targets growth from roughly 800,000 monthly transactions to over 27 million. At sustainable utilization levels, that requires at least 6x current capacity. Leios delivers 10x or more — giving significant room to grow. It works by enhancing Cardano's existing Ouroboros Praos consensus with Endorser Blocks and committee-based validation, increasing throughput without compromising decentralization or making stake pool operations unviable. The current budget cycle (ending June 2026\) delivers an early public testnet. This proposal picks up from there and focuses on three objectives. First, a release candidate: maturing the implementation through substantial engineering, conformance testing against formal specifications, and integration into the primary node. Second, high confidence: systematic validation through parameter exploration, load testing, and adversarial red-teaming on the public testnet. Third, hard-fork enabling: everything within IO's control to make the Leios hard fork possible, including stable interfaces for ecosystem tools (DB-Sync, Mithril, Blockfrost), SPO and developer workshops, governance artifact preparation, and contingency procedures. The proposal explicitly excludes external dependencies like the community hard-fork vote from its acceptance criteria — those are captured as risks, not promises. Intersect administers all funds through milestone-based smart contracts with independent oversight. Unspent funds return to the Treasury. **Treasury Ask:** ₳27,714,342