Skip to main content
Developer Experience

Developer Experience

A six-month program to streamline Cardano’s developer tooling, documentation, and onboarding, targeting a 30%+ improvement in developer growth rate.

The initiative details

The team behind the initiative

The opportunity

Cardano’s technology and philosophy have always attracted serious builders. However, the current developer experience (DevX) is subpar and fragmented, making it difficult for new and experienced developers to build, test, and deploy decentralized applications efficiently.

The opportunity lies in harmonizing tooling, establishing canonical patterns, and consolidating documentation and libraries — changes that will accelerate development cycles and lower the barrier to entry for developers coming from other ecosystems (EVM, Web2), converting early interest into long-term commitment.

A survey of 109 Cardano developers identified the highest-impact areas: fragmented tooling, scattered documentation, a steep onboarding ramp, and a lack of ecosystem-wide coordination. These are solvable problems, and solving them is the single highest-leverage investment for accelerating developer growth and, by extension, DApp deployment, user acquisition, and economic activity across the network.

The Initiative

Developer Experience

Developer Experience

This proposal funds a focused six-month program to streamline Cardano’s developer tooling, documentation, and onboarding experience, directly targeting a 30%+ improvement in developer growth rate.

The program delivers seven workstreams:

  • cardano-init: A Setup CLI that scaffolds new Cardano DApp projects with a selectable stack, AI/LLM-native integrations, and a plugin architecture for community extension. Getting started with a new Cardano project takes minutes, not days.
  • ContractsLibrary: An OpenZeppelin-style library of standardized, reusable smart contracts with an emphasis on DeFi. Launching with at least five production-ready contracts, documented and ready for audit.
  • Developer HUB: A single entry point for developers new to Cardano, delivered through the Developer Portal. Tailored onboarding paths for EVM developers, Web2 developers, and technical entrepreneurs.
  • Community Collaboration: Bounties paid to maintainers and contributors of key DevX-related tools and libraries, targeting the biggest pain points across on-chain and off-chain interaction.
  • Developer Outreach: Supporting existing channels, translating community questions into documentation improvements, and creating content for the new tooling.
  • Measurement: A controlled hackathon designed to produce quantitative data on developer experience to evaluate the success of this proposal and serve as a baseline for future work.
  • Reactive: Addressing high-ROI opportunities surfaced through ecosystem alignment. Selection criteria and outcomes reported transparently.

IO is collaborating with Intersect’s Developer Advocate Program and exploring a technology partnership with TxPipe to broaden delivery capacity and bring specialist developer tooling expertise to the initiative. This partnership model ensures these critical capabilities are supported by multiple capable organizations aligned with Cardano’s long-term goals.

Treasury ask: ₳3,601,926

Who is building

This initiative is led by Robertino Martinez at Input Output (IO), with a delivery team composed of project management, TypeScript and web engineering, DApp development, Rust tooling, and developer relations specialists.

IO is working alongside the Cardano Foundation on the Developer HUB and collaborating with Intersect’s Developer Advocate Program. IO is also exploring a technology partnership with TxPipe to broaden delivery capacity and bring specialist developer tooling expertise to the ecosystem.

"I've been building and teaching how to build on Cardano for almost 5 years now. Over the years, I’ve seen the ecosystem through the eyes of many waves of new developers. Those who achieve mastery stay, but the vast majority abandon due to the high onboarding cost. I want to change that."
Robertino MartinezInitiative Owner
"Compared with most ecosystems, Cardano's friction to get started is too high. The Developer Experience proposal approach to harmonize our existing tooling, documentation, and libraries is what we need to streamline onboarding and finally make it easy for developers to join our community and build new products."
Jingles KFounder MeshJS & UTXOS

Expected outcomes

  • A 30%+ improvement in Cardano’s developer relative growth rate, meaning Cardano gains ground against competing ecosystems.
  • A measurable decrease in development time and onboarding effort, validated through the controlled hackathon measurement.
  • A measurable improvement in developer NPS scores.
  • More shipped DApps, directly contributing to Adoption and Utility, Ecosystem Growth, and Monthly Active Users.

Ecosystem Impact

This initiative is fully aligned with three core Cardano 2030 KPIs: Monthly Active Users, Monthly Transactions, and Annual Protocol Revenue. It advances two strategic pillars: Adoption and Utility, by removing the primary barrier to builder adoption, and Community and Ecosystem Growth, by expanding the developer talent pool through structured onboarding and community engagement.

Governance links

Formal treasury proposal

The on-chain submission, read the full proposal text and rationale.

View the formal proposal

Join the Conversation

Ask questions, share views, and follow the community debate.

X Spaces