Cardano Treasury Proposals Cut In Half as Leios Upgrade and Pogun Headline 2026 Slate

Input Output just filed nine Cardano treasury proposals worth $38.9 million for 2026, and the number that jumps out is the one they didn't ask for. Last year IO requested $97.5 million from the community. This year's ask is roughly half that. The engineering shop behind Cardano is deliberately shrinking its dependency on the treasury, and the 2026 slate reads like a company trying to finish what it started before stepping back.

Why Is Input Output Cutting Its Cardano Treasury Ask in Half?

The short answer: IO wants off the treasury drip. In the release shared Wednesday, the organization said it is moving toward a self-sufficient model and plans to reduce its ask every year until it can fund operations without community dollars. That is not language you hear often from a core development shop. Most protocols watch their foundations grow, not shrink.

IO screened more than 25 initiatives before settling on the nine Cardano treasury proposals that went public today. Two themes run through all of them. Decentralization, meaning handing work to a wider set of contributors. And scalability, meaning pushing Cardano's throughput and cost profile to a place where real applications stop having to make excuses.

Call it a wind-down with a roadmap. IO is not walking away. It is trying to finish the infrastructure in flight, hand the steering wheel to the community, and prove the network can operate without a single dominant funder. Whether DReps buy that framing shows up in the May 24, 2026 vote.

Leios Upgrade: Cardano's Bet on 1,000 TPS

The biggest technical swing in the slate is the Leios upgrade, a consensus redesign that IO claims can lift Cardano's Layer 1 throughput by a factor of 10 to 65. The target: more than 1,000 transactions per second on base layer. For a chain that has long been criticized as slow to ship and slow to confirm, that is the kind of number that either reshapes the conversation or gets quoted back with receipts.

The Leios testnet ships in June 2026. Mainnet is targeted for year-end. Running alongside it is UTXOHD, a node optimization designed to keep Cardano nodes runnable on residential hardware indefinitely. That pairing matters. Raw throughput is easy to fake if you're willing to centralize. Throughput on a chain whose nodes still fit on a home PC is harder.

IO frames both upgrades as the closing chapter of a multi-year performance roadmap. For the developers who've been waiting on cheaper scripts and faster settlement, it reads less like a promise and more like a deadline.

IO is perfectly placed to adapt quickly, increasing the utility and experience across the ecosystem, and we feel that these proposals relate directly to growth for the community.

Pogun: Bringing Bitcoin DeFi to Cardano

The other headline bet is Pogun, an end-to-end Bitcoin DeFi engine built for Cardano. Pogun is not one product. It is three stitched together: a non-margin credit market, yield infrastructure, and a trust-minimized Bitcoin bridge. The credit market hits mainnet in Q2 2026.

Here is the pitch in plain terms. BTC holders who don't want to wrap their coins into some centralized custodian's IOU now get a path to lend, borrow, and earn yield through Cardano rails. The trust-minimized bridge is the load-bearing piece. If it works as advertised, Pogun becomes one of the few places where Bitcoin liquidity moves into a non-EVM DeFi environment without handing custody to a bridge operator.

That is also the part worth watching with suspicion. Every bridge on every chain has promised trust-minimization. Most have delivered something closer to trust-relocated. Pogun's actual security model, the signer set, the fraud proofs, the failure modes, all of that will matter more than the launch date.

What Else Is in the 2026 Slate?

Beyond Leios and Pogun, the nine proposals cover most of the pieces a working L1 ecosystem needs. Plutus script optimization is in, targeting roughly a 25% reduction in script preparation overhead. Layer two scaling shows up through Hydra and Midgard Labs. Formal verification gets funding via the High Assurance consortium. Blockfrost, the API layer most Cardano dapps lean on, is being scaled to handle Leios-era throughput.

Three protocol-level upgrades are also on the ballot:

• CIP-159, which adds native micro-fee support for tiny transactions
• CPS-23, a native multi-asset on-chain treasury
• Babel Fees, letting users pay transaction costs in stablecoins without holding ADA

Who's Actually Building This?

IO is not going it alone, and the partner list is part of the pitch. VacuumLabs is working on Plutus. Midgard Labs is handling the L2 track. Pragma and the Cardano Foundation are picking up developer relations. A new dedicated entity for Haskell engineering is reportedly under discussion, which would slice off one of IO's longest-held responsibilities and hand it to a purpose-built team.

That distribution of work is the decentralization argument in practice. For years, Cardano watchers have pointed at IO as both the engine and the single point of failure. Spreading engineering across four or five organizations changes the risk picture, assuming the new teams deliver and the coordination doesn't fall apart.

Every proposal is administered through Intersect, Cardano's member-based governance body, and funding is milestone-gated. That last detail matters. DReps are not writing a blank check. Money releases as milestones hit.

What Happens Between Now and May 24?

DReps have roughly a month to vote. Charles Hoskinson is expected to drop a video this week aimed directly at delegate representatives, which usually means the campaign is about to get loud. IO published its reasoning for what made the slate and what didn't, a level of transparency the organization framed as a requirement when the money belongs to the community.

The read here is simple. If the proposals pass, Cardano gets its biggest technical push in years, a credible Bitcoin DeFi play, and a governance dry run at scale. If they don't, IO has to go back to the drawing board with a smaller runway and a community that just said no. Either outcome tells you something real about how decentralized Cardano actually is.

A year ago, $97.5 million moved through with far less scrutiny. This year, a smaller ask will get a harder look. That is probably how it should work.