Back
IO Global Submits Nine Cardano Treasury Proposals for 2026 Budget Cycle

IO Global Submits Nine Cardano Treasury Proposals for 2026 Budget Cycle

Input Output Global cut its 2026 Cardano treasury request to $46.8 million as it prioritizes Leios scaling, Bitcoin DeFi through Pogun, and a broader shift toward third-party development teams.

BTC
ADA

Fact Check
The claim's core points are supported by secondary reporting visible in x post 2047099806569660732 and x post 2046975904048369969: IO Global submitted 9 Cardano treasury proposals, the ask was described as roughly 50% below the prior year, and Leios was framed around a June testnet timeline. The search result for IO Global Submits Reduced Treasury Proposals for Cardano 2026 also mentions 62.1 million ADA. However, no primary source from IO Global, Cardano governance, or an official Cardano channel was successfully fetched in this run, and the specific detail that DRep voting is open until May 24 was not directly validated from a fetched authoritative page. Therefore the overall claim appears plausible and partly corroborated, but remains short of a likely_true rating due to missing primary-source confirmation.
    Reference: 
Summary

Input Output Global, the main software lab behind Cardano, is seeking $46.8 million from the network’s treasury for 2026 operations, down from the $97.5 million approved for 2025. The nine-part funding plan emphasizes Leios, a major consensus upgrade intended to lift Cardano from roughly 7 to 10 transactions per second to more than 1,000 TPS and support a rise in monthly transactions from about 800,000 to more than 27 million under the network’s Vision 2030 goals. The proposal also funds Bitcoin-focused DeFi through the Pogun initiative, including a bilateral credit market, a yield product, and a BitVM-powered bridge planned for 2026. Additional spending targets Hydra, Midgard, Plutus improvements, and new developer tools, while IO Global says external firms such as Midgard Labs and VacuumLabs are expected to take over larger portions of development work by the end of 2026.

Terms & Concepts
  • Leios: A proposed Cardano consensus and scaling upgrade designed to increase throughput through features including Endorser Blocks and committee-based validation.
  • DeFi: Short for decentralized finance, a category of blockchain-based financial applications such as lending, yield products, and trading that operate without traditional intermediaries.
  • Plutus: Cardano’s smart contract programming language and execution framework, used by developers to build decentralized applications on the network.