Input Output Global has submitted nine treasury proposals for 2026 as Cardano prepares for the next stage of its network upgrade plan.
The company said in a post on X that its total funding request is “just under 50 percent” of last year’s level. Community voting on the proposals is open and will continue through May 24.
The proposal places the Leios scaling upgrade at the center of Cardano’s roadmap. Input Output said the network needs higher capacity to meet long-term goals.
“The 2030 Vision sets a clear target: Cardano must scale from today’s approximately 800,000 transactions per month to over 27 million,” the company wrote in its consensus proposal.
The same proposal described Leios as “the mechanism purpose-built to get there.”
Leios still in progress before 2026 launch
Input Output is aiming to bring Leios to testnet in June, with a mainnet launch targeted by the end of 2026. The upgrade is designed to raise throughput while keeping Cardano’s current consensus design in place.
According to the company, Leios could deliver a 10x to 65x increase in throughput through features such as endorser blocks and committee-based validation.
At the same time, the public Leios development tracker shows that the work is still in progress. The specifications are largely complete, but testnet progress is still limited, at about 24 percent based on the tracker referenced in the report.
That status suggests that Input Output still has major development steps to complete before the upgrade reaches production on the Cardano mainnet.
Maintenance and developer tools in focus
Beyond Leios, Input Output has requested 62.1 million ADA for network maintenance. At current values cited in the report, that amount is worth more than $15.8 million.
The funding would support node upgrades, network monitoring, and security work. The company said this part of the plan is essential because “everything else depends on it.”
Several other proposals focus on developer tools and the broader software environment around Cardano. Input Output said the current developer experience remains “fragmented” and continues to slow adoption.
A six-month initiative would aim to improve tooling and onboarding after internal research found that many developers leave the ecosystem because of a “high onboarding cost.” The company also wants to expand formal verification tools and improve the Plutus smart contract platform so that verification does not require “a PhD and three months of setup.”
Layer 2 and fee changes
The proposals also connect Leios to Cardano’s Layer 2 strategy. Input Output said Hydra and the Midgard rollup should work alongside the base-layer upgrade rather than replace it.
The company said “only with both does Cardano have a credible L2 story,” linking the scaling plan to future growth in decentralized finance, tokenized real-world assets, and enterprise use cases.
Another part of the treasury package focuses on new economic models for the network. Planned upgrades include “Babel Fees,” which would let users pay transaction fees with Cardano-native tokens instead of ADA.
Input Output also wants to support wallet-level micro-fees that could give developers new revenue options. A separate proposal, called Pogun, targets bitcoin liquidity.
Moreover, the company described BTC as “the world’s most valuable digital asset” that is “almost entirely idle,” and said Cardano could act as a credit and yield layer for that capital.
Treasury vote follows prior funding approval
The new proposal cycle comes after Cardano community members approved a $71 million development fund for the network’s engineering work last year. That allocation, equal to 96 million ADA, represented about 13 percent of the treasury and was intended to support 12 months of upgrades and infrastructure work.
The latest proposals show that Input Output is now seeking a lower level of funding while still pushing several major technical changes.
One of the nine proposals is the consensus proposal, for which the company is seeking 27.7 million ADA from the treasury. Input Output said this funding would help complete the throughput work needed to make Cardano self-sustaining through higher network usage and fee generation.
“The slate delivers the performance, security, and capability upgrades needed to move Cardano into its next phase,” the company said in its X post.
Meanwhile, Cardano’s native token, ADA, traded at about $0.25 at press time. Its 24-hour trading volume stood at $475.9 million, while the token showed a daily gain of 2.11 percent and a seven-day gain of 4.63 percent.
With a circulating supply of 37 billion ADA, Cardano’s market capitalization was listed at about $9.38 billion. The price move came as the market absorbed the new treasury proposals and the renewed focus on scaling.