Cardano Treasury Withdrawal Proposals

**Proposal as pdf: [https://ipnso-com.ipns.dweb.link/?cid=QmQPLwjTwZeGrzsgs2QiC6crJLcMg64fU2kDYZmPZ9o7wf](https://ipnso-com.ipns.dweb.link/?cid=QmQPLwjTwZeGrzsgs2QiC6crJLcMg64fU2kDYZmPZ9o7wf)** Cardano's long-term utility depends on attracting and retaining developers — and this proposal accelerates that by making it dramatically easier to build on the platform. The target: a 30%+ improvement in developer growth rate within 12 months. Why this matters: Cardano currently has roughly 550 active developers, with no signs of growth, whereas Ethereum added nearly 2,000 new developers per year on average over the last 6 years. Survey data from 109 Cardano builders points to a clear set of barriers — fragmented tooling, scattered documentation, lack of coordination, and a steep learning curve. These are solvable issues, and solving them unlocks the ecosystem flywheel: more builders lead to more DApps, which attract more users and generate more protocol revenue, which attracts more builders. The initiative delivers five practical outcomes. First, community alignment paired with a bounty program that incentivizes improvements to ecosystem tools and libraries where pain points are greatest. Second, a setup tool ("cardano-init") that lets a new developer go from zero to a working project in minutes, regardless of their preferred tech stack. Third, an OpenZeppelin-style collection of ready-to-use smart contracts that gives builders a solid starting point. Fourth, a unified, simplified onboarding experience in the Developer Portal, built in collaboration with Intersect and coordinated with the team responsible for the Developer Portal. Fifth, a measurement hackathon designed to quantify progress and identify the next priorities. IO is collaborating with Intersect's Developer Advocate Program and exploring a partnership with TxPipe to broaden delivery capacity. Intersect serves as the designated administrator, with milestone-based disbursement and independent third-party assurance. Unspent funds are returned to the Treasury. **Treasury Ask:** ₳3,601,926

**Treasury Withdrawal Proposal** By: Cardano Foundation & EMURGO This Proposal as a PDF: https://ipnso-com.ipns.dweb.link/?cid=QmQc5zt319nHtseyj4vVKkm4PFCHS7To3WCs6pH3SGgrxq This proposal outlines a high-impact, effective, dual-event strategy to be executed in Singapore from October 5–8, 2026. This strategy is designed to maximize budget efficiency by co-locating two key events to maximize the reach of Cardano and its ecosystem: 1. **The Cardano Summit 2026:** A two-day dedicated event hosted by the Cardano Foundation, providing a showcase for Cardano's community innovation and technology, enterprise applications, institutional use cases, regulatory roundtables, and governance maturity. Interest in the Cardano Summit, from both media and enterprise, has steadily increased since its inception, reaching its highest level in 2025/2026. 2. **Cardano Premier Title Sponsorship at TOKEN2049**: The world's largest blockchain summit with over 25,000 attendees. The package includes a large-format exhibition booth in a premium traffic zone, a historic first-ever mainstage keynote— exclusive to title sponsors — on-site media interviews, and a dedicated ecosystem showcase from the top 20 projects on Cardano. This sponsorship will be fully managed by EMURGO. The Cardano Foundation and EMURGO teams are requesting a total of 14,076,539 ada ($3,659,900 USD): 1. 9,615,385 ada (USD 2,500,000) for the 2026 Cardano Summit managed by the Cardano Foundation 2. 4,461,154 ada (USD 1,159,900) for a “Title” TOKEN2049 Sponsorship managed by EMURGO Based on the current value of ada **at 0.26 to the US Dollar** (at the time of writing), this translates into 14,076,539 ada. Please see the Proposal Specifics and Budget Breakdown below for further details on the budget and administration process. Key Performance Indicators are included in Section 7 below. This proposal is being submitted outside of the Intersect budget process due to critical timing constraints, as payments made through this process are projected to be made in August or September at the earliest, which is unworkable for 2026 events. Waiting for this process would mean missing the crucial opportunity to build upon the Summit momentum generated in 2025. The full concept and slide deck can be found here: https://ipnso-com.ipns.dweb.link/?cid=QmaF8tt7prMb41TqSfN9GSJhM5PcWXVuD7uxYBDjecjaDX

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The Draper Dragon Orion Fund, L.P. (“Orion Fund”), managed by Draper Dragon Orion GP, LLC (“General Partner” or “GP”), is proposed as a multi-year, tranche-based ecosystem investment fund designed to support Cardano-native and Cardano-integrated companies, grow on-chain usage, and return capital to the Cardano Treasury (“Treasury”) over time. Importantly, the Orion Fund is structured so that Treasury exposure is incremental, capped, and fully governed. This proposal (“Proposal”) asks the Cardano community (“Community”) to vote only on the first Treasury withdrawal tranche of **ADA 50M,** which is approximately **$15M USD** (“Tranche One”), calculated using an assumed ADA price of $0.30, to launch the Orion Fund. Net proceeds from the direct investments made with a majority of the Treasury withdrawal contribution to the Orion Fund will be returned to the Treasury in accordance with the repayment schedule detailed in this Proposal.

## Executive Summary For the last year, we have engaged the Cardano community to discuss deployment of treasury funds into the DeFi ecosystem to boost liquidity. Under the old constitution, we received broad support (more than 67%) for a budget info action to deploy 50,000,000 ADA into the ecosystem. While we acknowledge a budget info action is not required under the current constitution, we feel encouraged to submit this withdrawal action to setup the legal and on chain components needed to carry out the liquidity deployment. For a detailed overview of what we are aiming to accomplish more broadly, we invite people to read the budget info action (gov_action1u4jrcvlkppjzuv5j9z5ksacwtvv77h6glu0knpcjut8gvjjfu0cqqt3alsy). In this Withdrawal Action, we propose withdrawing 800,000 ADA to setup a legal entity and audit the smart contract that will be built free of charge courtesy of Lucas and Kasey from UTxO Company. The user interface will be contributed by Hinson from Sidan Labs.

Blink Labs is requesting 6,900,000 ADA from the Cardano Treasury to fund twelve months of full-time engineering on Dingo, our Go Cardano node. Dingo is a work in progress, and that's the whole point of this proposal. But it's a substantial one: 1,290+ non-dependency PRs merged in the past year, Plutus V1/V2/V3 at 100% conformance, 314 passing conformance tests, VRF/KES crypto, ChainSync, mempool, and governance transaction support. This funding gets Dingo the rest of the way to mainnet block-production readiness: Ouroboros Praos consensus completion, Dijkstra hard fork support, CIP-0164 Linear Leios built alongside IO Engineering, a proper security audit, and the operational hardening that makes a node reliable at scale.

Amaru is an open-source project building a new, **fully interoperable block-producing node** that improves the overall accessibility and robustness of the Cardano network without compromising its safety and security. Amaru provides another perspective and solution for stake pool operators and developers alike, prioritizing **low hardware requirements** and a seamless user experience. The project is implemented primarily in Rust and aims to attract new contributors to the ecosystem's core maintenance. This is our second treasury withdrawal proposal, following [a successful budget](https://explorer.cardano.org/governance-action/gov_action1h4ygjv0hjfj3lmafcm76rpdzcm8vsvj9k5wejn3npyxwxm3fesnqqw9kxxz) and [treasury withdrawal](https://explorer.cardano.org/governance-action/gov_action1vrkk4dpuss8l3z9g4uc2rmf8ks0f7j534zvz9v4k85dlc54wa3zsqq68rx0) in mid-2025. We will recap what we have accomplished so far, thanks to this first allocation, and break down the objectives, scope, and timelines for 2026.

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This treasury withdrawal is submitted pursuant to the Budget Info Action “Cardano Critical Integrations Budget” (gov_action13a2dqgwxum7d6kjfprcs57cf9733ek2dkt5qnuhqd4ll5ntcwu7sqluwkxd) and can only be ratified if that Budget Info Action is approved by DReps and the Constitutional Committee. This governance action requests to withdraw ₳70,000,000 from the Cardano Treasury to establish a strategic integration fund supporting the onboarding of critical infrastructure, including tier-one stablecoins, institutional digital asset custody and wallet infrastructures, on-chain analytics platforms, cross-chain bridges, and pricing oracles to the Cardano ecosystem. These integrations are foundational for tier-one stablecoin deployment, large scale DeFi growth, and acceleration of RWA and DePin activity, strengthening Cardano’s long term fee generation and treasury sustainability. This project is being driven through close collaboration between Input | Output Global, the Cardano Foundation, and EMURGO, together with Midnight Foundation and Intersect, all of whom are actively engaged in negotiations with integration partners. Representatives from all five organizations form the Steering Committee, which is responsible for all executive decisions over how these funds will be committed and spent. Multiple partners are already at an executable stage, but with sensitive commercial negotiations underway, vendor identities and line item costs remain confidential. Vendor identities can only be disclosed once integrations are completed. Funds will be administered by Intersect under a performance and milestone-based structure over a period of up to 24 months. Drawdowns occur only after signed integration partnership agreements are submitted and verified. The Oversight Committee, a group of five independent entities within Intersect's budget administration framework, will review each drawdown or disbursal to confirm alignment between scope, amounts, and recipients. Deployment is expected to begin shortly after enactment of this withdrawal.

This proposal seeks a 5,000,000 ada budget loan from the Cardano Treasury to fund the Cardano Global Listing Expansion, a strategic initiative led by the Snek Foundation to list [SNEK](https://www.snek.com/) on top-tier centralized exchanges, retail brokers, and trading platforms. This proposal is the **first-ever loan-based treasury withdrawal** in Cardano governance, introducing a new model of accountability where funds are not given as grants but repaid with interest. As part of the governance process, a Board of Advisors will be appointed to ensure transparent execution and maximize ecosystem alignment. This board will include high-profile industry veterans like Tal Cohen (former CEO of Kraken), Phillip Pon (CEO of Emurgo), Fahmi Syed (President of Midnight Foundation), and Frederik Gregaard (CEO of Cardano Foundation), with additional top-tier names to be announced. *SNEK is the largest community token on Cardano, holding the highest market capitalization, over 42,000 wallets, and more than 2 billion ADA in all-time trading volume.* Over the past two years, the Snek Foundation has already invested over $5 million, entirely self-funded, to secure major exchange listings. Snek delivered the first, second, and third-ever Tier 1 listings for any Cardano native token, with Kraken, Crypto.com, and Kucoin, setting historic precedents for the ecosystem. With this proposal and with the support of our partners, we aim to unlock greater visibility, liquidity, and accessibility for the broader Cardano ecosystem by leveraging SNEK’s proven momentum and market position. This loan will be continuously repaid from Snek network activities, with a final balance plus interest settled after a closing audit in three to five years. Interest is set at 2.44% annualized (2.37% staking rate + 0.07%), compounded yearly. By structuring this as a repayable loan, the Snek Foundation is once again trailblazing for the ecosystem; demonstrating how treasury capital can be deployed responsibly while setting a precedent for future projects. This treasury withdrawal follows the approved Budget: ₳5M Loan for Cardano's Global Listing Expansion - Powered by Snek ([gov_action1jr84r96lnsvu9yd6c0jhxe9gj5r7vnd2pgkntc6klplxdpyzz4tqqc9uldx](https://gov.tools/outcomes/governance_actions/90cf51975f9c19c291bac3e57364a89507e64daa0a2d35e356f87e6684821556#0)). The administrator of the budget funds will be Intersect, utilizing the treasury-contracts framework to manage funds.