Frequently Asked Questions

Three reasons. Each of the nine initiatives stands on its own merits and benefits from being voted on with full context. Direct submission routes each proposal straight to the decision-makers CIP-1694 was designed for, with no intermediate consolidation step. And the portfolio’s delivery cadence, with multiple Q3 2026 start dates tied to the Dijkstra hard fork, gives every initiative a clean, parallel route to ratification.

No. Intersect continues to play a central role in the disbursement and oversight of every IO proposal ratified by DReps. Funds are held in Intersect’s Treasury Reserve Smart Contract framework, the five-entity Oversight Committee independently verifies key administrative actions on-chain, and milestone payments require third-party assurance sign-off before release. What differs is the submission step: each proposal reaches DReps as its own governance action with its own rationale, scope, and vote.

IO is concentrating resources where it can add the most distinctive value, with specialist partners taking on focused workstreams alongside it. Each year, IO aims to ask for less as more of the work moves to ecosystem partners and Cardano’s contributor base broadens.

No. IO is present, invested, and leading delivery on every 2026 proposal. What is evolving is how some infrastructure is sustained long-term, by expanding the base of teams capable of contributing to it. Long-term resilience requires more than one organization at the core of any critical system.

It varies. Confirmed partnerships are named as such. Where conversations are still forming, language like ‘exploring collaboration with’ or ‘in discussion with’ is used. Nothing is overstated.

Nine notable initiatives, including Anti-Grinding, Mithril, and Tiered Pricing, were deprioritized not because they lack merit but to ensure that at IO, we direct our energy where we believe impact will be highest in 2026. Many of these deliver real value, and represent real opportunities for others in the ecosystem and we welcome seeing them picked up. Full rationale for every deprioritized initiative is published transparently on this site.

Every proposal disburses through Intersect’s Treasury Reserve Smart Contract (TRSC) framework, with Project-Specific Smart Contracts per engagement. The five-entity Oversight Committee, Sundae Labs, the Cardano Foundation, Dquadrant, Xerberus, and NMKR, independently verifies key administrative actions on-chain. Each milestone payment requires third-party assurance sign-off before release, and any unspent funds return to the Cardano treasury at delivery close with public reconciliation.

No. The oversight architecture is the same as the 2025 cycle: constitutional safeguards including the Net Change Limit and Constitutional Committee review, smart-contract-based disbursement controls, and milestone-gated third-party assurance. What changes is the clarity of the vote, direct and proposal-by-proposal, with full visibility into each initiative.

DReps vote on each proposal individually, with a separate 67% supermajority and 5/7 Constitutional Committee threshold required for each. Every Treasury Withdrawal governance action links to the full IO proposal on IPFS with CIP-108 metadata, and there is no intermediate summarization layer between the proposal and DRep review. A DRep who supports one initiative but has questions about another can vote that view precisely, yes on one, no on the other.

Funds are released against milestones with independent third-party assurance, audited on-chain through Intersect’s TRSC framework. Public milestone reporting via Intersect’s delivery assurance function, on-chain dashboards, and full reconciliation of undisbursed funds apply across every proposal. IO’s prior treasury delivery metrics are also published within each proposal: ₳130.7M funding allocated, ₳81.9M withdrawn to date, IOR at 100% complete, Blockfrost at 88% complete and IOE at 60% complete.

Maintenance funds nine continuous functional areas (node engineering, DevOps and CI/CD, performance, quality assurance, release, monitoring, open source, documentation, and component maintenance) running in parallel for nine months. Every other proposal in the portfolio depends on this foundation. The majority of costs fund delivery personnel and the infrastructure required to optimize Cardano at production scale.

The range reflects the parameter space simulated as part of CIP-164 and is being validated through ongoing adversarial testing and load experiments. Cardano’s 2030 target of 27 million monthly transactions requires at least 3x current capacity, and Leios delivers 10x even at the lower end of the range, giving the network significant headroom to grow.

They serve different trust models. Hydra is built for known-party, high-frequency environments such as AI agent micropayments, B2B payments, and gaming sessions. Midgard is built for open, permissionless environments such as public DEXs, lending protocols, and NFT markets. Supporting only one would leave a significant coverage gap. The proposal also funds L2-agnostic shared infrastructure that benefits both systems and every future Cardano L2.

Programming languages that are widely adopted continuously evolve. This proposal focuses on the next stage: lowering real-world execution costs through new built-ins, strengthening formal correctness for node diversity, and improving the developer experience as usage scales and new requirements emerge.

This program ships a defined set of artifacts: a one-command project setup CLI, a contracts library with at least five audit-ready smart contracts, and a restructured Developer Portal, with a measurement hackathon at the end of the cycle. It is built on direct feedback from 109 Cardano developers and on the work that community teams like Mesh, TxPipe, the Cardano Foundation, and others have already done.

An investment. The Cardano treasury receives 20% of quarterly EBITDA until the full $2.95M USD-equivalent is returned, then 5% of EBITDA in perpetuity. Funds are milestone-gated, and any undisbursed amount is returned under defined conditions. This is the first revenue-returning investment model in the Cardano treasury.

Blockfrost’s free tier has never been a commercial service. It has been a deliberate subsidy paid by Blockfrost to the ecosystem since inception, serving roughly 90% of all free-tier Cardano API traffic. Asking the treasury to share that cost recognizes community infrastructure as a shared responsibility, not a single entity’s burden.