Blockfrost
Transitioning Blockfrost into a free, community-governed public good, owned by the people who build on it.
The team behind the initiative
The opportunity
Blockfrost belongs to the people who build on it.
Blockfrost is the access layer Cardano builds on. It's the free, reliable way to read from and write to the chain without running your own node, and the wallets, explorers, tools, and long tail of builders across the ecosystem rely on it every day. It's been free since day one.
This proposal makes it the ecosystem's, for good. Blockfrost becomes a public good the community owns and governs together: free for everyone, open, and neutral. The access layer Cardano already runs on, owned by the people who actually build on it.
The Initiative
Blockfrost
With this proposal, Blockfrost becomes a free, community-governed public good through three components:
A free, open public API, permanently.
A single public API covering mainnet, preview, and preprod, free for everyone, with no paid tier operated by the entity. The free access developers have relied on becomes a permanent, community-owned guarantee rather than a commercial decision. Teams that require commercial-grade service, such as higher limits, SLAs, or dedicated support, obtain it from independent partners that build on top of the open API, sustaining a healthy market around Blockfrost without monetising the public good itself.
A full transfer to the community.
All of Blockfrost's source code, trademarks, and domains transfer into community stewardship under an independent, community-governed not-for-profit. The full stack is open source, so anyone can run, contribute to, or fork it. Input Output steps back from ownership and commercial control to a non-voting advisory role for the duration of the transition.
Community governance and independent oversight.
A community-elected board directs the project, sets its operating model, and oversees both the team and the use of funds. As an elected body accountable to the ecosystem, it places the decisions that shape Blockfrost in the hands of the community rather than any single company.
Treasury ask: โณ 9,832,979
Who is building
This initiative is delivered by the Blockfrost team, transitioning the project into community stewardship under an independent, community-governed not-for-profit.
Expected outcomes
- Blockfrost is established as a community-governed public good under an independent not-for-profit, with the transition architecture published and a public usage dashboard live (Q3 2026).
- A community board is elected on-chain under published, verifiable rules, with the elected board taking its mandate (Q4 2026).
- All public API traffic (mainnet, preview, preprod) is served by the new stack, and all Blockfrost intellectual property is legally and irreversibly transferred into community stewardship (Q1 2027).
- A free, open API maintained at a minimum of 99% monthly uptime throughout, verifiable on the public dashboard, with quarterly technical and budget reports. Any unspent funds are returned to the Cardano Treasury.
Ecosystem Impact
Keeping the access layer free and open directly supports MAU and Adoption: it removes the cost barrier for the next wave of builders and keeps the wallets, explorers, and DApps the community already uses running. Moving it to community governance, on an open and forkable stack, drives Reliability and Resilience by removing a single company as a point of failure for the infrastructure everyone depends on.
Because the model is built to sustain itself, funded by the businesses that build on top of it rather than by recurring treasury support, it advances Ecosystem Sustainability for the long term. This aligns with the Cardano 2030 strategy across Pillar 1 (Infrastructure and Research Excellence), Pillar 2 (Adoption and Utility), and Pillar 5 (Ecosystem Sustainability and Resilience).
Governance links
Formal treasury proposal
The on-chain submission, read the full proposal text and rationale.
View the formal proposalJoin the Conversation
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