The laboratory that was at the origins of Cardano wants to enter the trillion-dollar Bitcoin market. But community approval is essential. We’re talking about a budget of $46.8 million.
Input Output Global, the main Cardano development team, has nearly halved its request. Now they are asking for $46.8 million for work in 2026 through the network’s governance system.
It’s not just about saving money. It looks like the team is gradually moving away from a model where everything depends on a single player. More and more tasks are being handed off to third-party developers.
The budget itself is divided into nine areas. It’s smaller than last year’s, when $97.5 million was approved for 2025. But the essence hasn’t changed. The team essentially has two main goals. The first is to attract Bitcoin liquidity into DeFi. The second is to upgrade the network’s base layer for Vision 2030.
Cardano remains one of the largest cryptocurrencies. The project has its own treasury, which is replenished by network fees.
Previously, most of this money went to Input Output. Now the approach is changing. The company clearly wants to gradually reduce its dependence on these funds.
By 2026, part of the development may be outsourced. Midgard Labs and VacuumLabs are already being mentioned.
Cardano Scales for Vision 2030
The largest part of the $46.8 million budget is aimed at an upgrade called Leios. This is a major consensus upgrade that should radically increase the network’s throughput.
At Input Output they believe that without this, Vision 2030 simply can’t be achieved. Currently, the network processes about 800,000 transactions per month, while the target is much higher and exceeds 27 million.
At the moment, Cardano has bottlenecks. Transaction finalization takes about two hours, and the speed remains at 7-10 operations per second. Because of this, the network has long lagged behind faster competitors such as Solana and second-layer solutions based on Ethereum.
Leios is supposed to change this while maintaining security. The update will introduce an Endorser Blocks mechanism and a committee-based validation system. As a result, throughput could increase by 10-65 times.
If everything goes according to plan, Cardano will be able to exceed 1,000 transactions per second. This will allow the network to generate enough fees and remain economically sustainable.
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The timeline is quite tight. The public testnet is planned for June 2026, and the mainnet release is expected closer to the end of the year.
At the same time, the team is strengthening other scaling directions. This includes not only the base layer but also off-chain solutions.
This includes the development of the Hydra protocol. It’s a state channels-based solution that enables almost instant and feeless micropayments.
Work is also ongoing on Midgard. This is a permissionless optimistic rollup that leverages Cardano‘s accounting model. It allows for a one-sided fraud proof mechanism, potentially reducing second-layer transaction costs below one cent.
Entering the Trillion-Dollar Bitcoin Market
While the main focus of the roadmap is on infrastructure, the most commercially aggressive project for 2026 is called Pogun.
This is a DeFi engine created specifically to turn Bitcoin from a passive asset into working capital within the Cardano ecosystem.
At Input Output they are betting on the network’s architecture. We’re talking about the Extended UTXO model, which gives Cardano an advantage over account-based systems like Ethereum.
Since this model is directly related to Bitcoin’s logic, developers can create more predictable financial mechanisms. Fees become transparent, and the risk of manipulation through MEV is virtually absent.
The development of Pogun is divided into several stages.
In the second quarter of 2026, the team plans to launch a non-margin lending market. Unlike classic DeFi protocols, which rely on oracles and liquidations, a different approach is used here.
Borrowers and lenders will negotiate terms directly. Collateral is lost only in the event of a complete default, not due to short-term intraday price fluctuations.
In the third quarter, a yield application will appear. It will allow regular users to allocate capital to fixed-term strategies without having to engage in complex negotiations.
The final stage is scheduled for the fourth quarter. Then, a minimal-trust bridge based on BitVM will launch. It operates on a 1 of N model, where one honest participant is enough for security. Such a participant could be the institutional company itself using the bridge to move BTC.
Focus on Developers and Plutus Upgrade
To ensure all the new first- and second-layer capabilities actually lead to ecosystem growth, a significant portion of the budget is allocated to improving developer tools.
Input Output wants to accelerate the influx of new developers by at least 30%. To do this, the team is simplifying the tech stack and making entry into the ecosystem less complicated.
The key area here is optimizing Plutus. This is the main programming language for all Cardano smart contracts. Developers currently face high execution costs and long script preparation times.
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The 2026 plan includes specific changes. The team intends to expand cryptographic primitives and remove unnecessary checks that currently increase script preparation time by about 25%.
All these updates should reduce the cost of operating on the network and make complex dApps more accessible economically.
At the same time, the company is launching new tools. Among them are the cardano-init command-line interface and a library of ready-made smart contracts in the style of OpenZeppelin, which can be used and tested without unnecessary risks.
They are also removing unnecessary barriers to entry. For example, it will no longer be necessary to deal with Nix or C-library-level dependencies.
As a result, the time to launch a new project should decrease from several days to just a few minutes.
