Cardano developer Input Output is seeking 52% less funding in 2026 as it scales back dependence on community money.
A core builder behind Cardano is asking for less this year, aiming to depend less on public funds and narrow its focus to a smaller set of upgrades.
Blockchain firm Input Output has submitted nine funding proposals totaling about $46.8 million for 2026, roughly half of the $97.5 million it asked for last year. The request is now moving through a community vote that runs until late May, with roughly 1,000 delegates taking part.
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Cardano’s Leios Upgrade
The lower ask points to a change in how the company approaches funding. Instead of covering a wide range of ongoing work through the treasury, the proposals focus more on specific upgrades.
At the center is a major upgrade called Leios, designed to push Cardano’s throughput above 1,000 transactions per second (TPS), up from current real-time levels of well below 1 TPS and peak capacity of around 15 TPS.
The upgrade is described as “the largest technical initiative in the portfolio,” targeting “a 10-65x increase in L1 throughput.”
Seeking Bitcoin DeFi Liquidity
Another upgrade, called Pogun, seeks around $4 million in funding and is aimed at building “an end-to-end Bitcoin DeFi engine,” covering credit markets, yield infrastructure and a BTC▲$63,585.00 bridge. The proposal reads:
“Bitcoin is the world’s most valuable digital asset, and it is almost entirely idle. The race to become the dominant credit and liquidity layer for BTC is the largest open market opportunity in crypto. Pogun positions Cardano to capture it.”
The upgrade is laid out as a full stack rather than a single app, rolling out in stages across the whole 2026. It starts with a non-margin credit market expected in Q2. It’s followed by a yield app in Q3 and a BitVM-based Bitcoin bridge planned for Q4.
Other Cardano Upgrades
Alongside Leios and Pogun, the rest of the proposals aren’t packaged as branded upgrades.
- One large bucket is Cardano maintenance, which covers node software updates and bug fixes.
- Another set focuses on core engineering, including improvements to the ledger and networking layer.
- There are also proposals around developer tooling, covering SDK updates and APIs.
Some proposals include research and scaling work beyond Leios, looking at optimizations to throughput, data handling, and system efficiency. These are smaller, incremental changes that improve performance step by step rather than a single large upgrade.
Finally, there is interoperability work, focused on connecting Cardano with other systems so assets and data can move between chains more easily.
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