On Wednesday, Input Output (IO), the engineering organization behind Cardano, submitted nine treasury funding proposals totaling $38.9 million to the community — a nearly 50% reduction from the $97.5 million requested last year. The cut is intentional: IO says it is transitioning toward a self-sufficient model and aims to reduce its treasury ask each year until it can fund operations independently. The 2026 slate is designed to complete infrastructure already in progress and hand over stewardship to a broader set of community contributors.
Leios Upgrade: Targeting 1,000+ TPS
The biggest technical bet is Leios, a consensus upgrade that could boost Layer 1 throughput by 10 to 65 times, with a goal of over 1,000 transactions per second. The Leios testnet is scheduled for June 2026, with mainnet deployment targeted by year-end. A complementary node optimization, UTXO HD, aims to keep Cardano nodes running on residential hardware indefinitely. IO frames both upgrades as the final piece of a performance roadmap years in the making.
Bitcoin DeFi Tool Pogun
On the Bitcoin front, IO is backing Pogun, an end-to-end Bitcoin DeFi engine for Cardano. Pogun bundles a non-margin credit market, yield infrastructure, and a trust-minimized Bitcoin bridge. Its credit market is set to launch on mainnet in Q2 2026.
Other Proposals and Protocol Upgrades
Other proposals include Plutus script optimization (targeting roughly 25% reduction in script preparation overhead), Layer 2 scalability through Hydra and Midgard Labs, formal verification tooling via the High Assurance consortium, and Blockfrost API infrastructure scaled for Leios throughput. Three protocol upgrades are also on the slate: CIP-159 (native micro-fee support), CPS-23 (native multi-asset on-chain treasury), and Babel Fees (allowing users to pay transaction costs in stablecoins without holding ADA).
IO is delivering several proposals in partnership with external teams, including VacuumLabs (Plutus), Midgard Labs (L2), Pragma, and the Cardano Foundation (developer relations). A new dedicated entity for Haskell engineering is under discussion.
Voting and Community Governance
All nine proposals are administered through Intersect, Cardano’s member-based governance body. Delegate representatives (DReps) have until May 24, 2026 to vote on the proposals. Funding is milestone-gated. Charles Hoskinson is expected to release a video this week addressed directly to DReps. IO also published its reasoning for what did not make the cut, framing the transparency as a condition of fiscal responsibility, given that treasury funds belong to the Cardano community.