IOG Submits 162M ADA Ask Across 9 Proposals. Here Is What They Are Proposing.

# Input Output Group Submits Nine Treasury Proposals Totaling 162 Million ADA Input Output Group has submitted nine governance proposals to the Cardano treasury, requesting a combined ₳162,142,627 across a portfolio of technical workstreams covering core protocol maintenance, throughput scaling, smart contract improvements, Layer 2 infrastructure, formal verification, developer tooling, indexing services, and a Bitcoin-bridged DeFi product. All nine proposals went live for DRep voting on April 22, 2026. A dedicated overview is available at momentum.cardano.iog.io . IO has publicly framed the submission as a deliberate 50% reduction from the prior funding cycle, stating that each proposal had to earn its place against a clear strategic framework after evaluating more than 25 initiatives. The proposals are organized under three themes: Performance, Security, and Capability. IO has also committed to publishing the initiatives that did not make the cut alongside the reasoning for their exclusion. ## 1. Cardano Maintenance Initiative — ₳62,134,630 Governance action on Cexplorer The largest of the nine proposals is the Cardano Maintenance Initiative, submitted jointly by IO and Ensurable Systems, requesting ₳62,134,630 to cover core platform maintenance from Q3 2026 through Q1 2027. According to the proposal, 74% of the total budget is allocated directly to development activity across nine functional areas: node bugfixing and architecture, DevOps and infrastructure, monitoring, documentation, open source support, performance, quality assurance, release and support, and component maintenance. The proposal frames maintenance as a non-discretionary and continuous requirement rather than a project with a fixed endpoint. It covers the work required to keep the live network stable, release-ready, and observable at all times, including coordinating protocol parameter changes, supporting downstream integrators during upgrades, maintaining open-source repositories, and running the performance testing infrastructure that informs hard fork planning. Ensurable Systems, a UK-based engineering firm, handles a defined share of the workstream alongside IO. Proposal lead is Michael Karg. ## 2. Consensus Initiative (Leios) — ₳27,714,342 Governance action on Cexplorer The Consensus Initiative requests ₳27,714,342 to develop Ouroboros Leios from its current public testnet prototype into a mainnet-ready protocol. Leios is designed as an overlay on the existing Ouroboros Praos consensus layer, introducing Endorser Blocks and committee-based validation to increase transaction throughput by 10 to 65 times current capacity without altering Cardano's security guarantees or stake pool economics. The Cardano 2030 Vision targets 27 million monthly transactions, up from approximately 800,000 today, and IO states this target is unreachable without Leios. The proposal covers three objectives: maturing the implementation to a mainnet-ready release candidate through conformance testing and integration into the primary node, systematic validation through parameter exploration and adversarial testing on the public testnet, and completing all preparatory work for a hard fork including stable client interfaces, SPO and developer workshops, and updated governance guardrails. IO notes that success is defined by completing these activities, not by the mainnet hard fork occurring within this funding cycle. Leads are Carlos Lopez De Lara and Sebastian Nagel, with an estimated duration of six to nine months. ## 3. Cardano Upgrades — ₳13,103,039 Governance action on Cexplorer The Cardano Upgrades proposal requests ₳13,103,039 for three distinct protocol-level features. CIP-159 Account Address Enhancement proposes a new address type that allows wallets and smart contracts to receive deposits without requiring a UTxO to already exist at the target address, simplifying recurring payment collection. CPS-23 Multi-Asset Treasury proposes changes that would allow the Cardano protocol treasury itself to hold and distribute assets beyond ADA, including stablecoins, framed as a risk management improvement for future governance-directed disbursements. Babel Fees implements the ability for users to pay transaction fees in native assets rather than exclusively in ADA, intended to lower the ADA prerequisite for users who hold other Cardano-native tokens but not enough ADA to cover fees. Leads are Michael Smolenski and Alexey Kuleshevich. ## 4. High Assurance Technical Collaboration — ₳13,078,578 Governance action on Cexplorer This proposal requests ₳13,078,578 across two workstreams focused on formal verification and developer environment infrastructure. The larger workstream funds Blaster, IO's automated formal verification tool that operates on Untyped Plutus Core. Blaster has already been used to prove correctness properties for production contracts including Djed and USDCx. The proposal extends it from single-contract to full DApp-level verification, adds compatibility with four new smart contract languages, delivers a Visual Studio Code extension with visual counterexample exploration, and builds a Common Vulnerability Library with pre-built property templates. Six collaborating organizations contribute: Lantr, Harmonic Labs, SAIB, Midgard Labs, TxPipe, and No.Witness Labs. The second workstream delivers a Container-Based Developer Environment, a single-command pre-configured setup that includes the complete Plinth toolchain at verified, compatible versions. The goal is to reduce the time from a new machine to a working Plutus development setup from hours to minutes. Leads are Stefano Leone and Romain Soulat. ## 5. Enhancing Plutus: Performance, Correctness, and Usability — ₳11,877,575 Governance action on Cexplorer IO and VacuumLabs jointly submitted this proposal requesting ₳11,877,575 to improve the Plutus smart contract platform across three workstreams. The Performance workstream targets reductions in on-chain execution overhead, including removal of an unnecessary scope check in the UPLC evaluator that IO estimates adds approximately 25% overhead to contract execution times. The Correctness workstream covers CIP-0156, which proposes a multiIndexArray builtin enabling efficient indexed access to arrays within Plutus. The Usability workstream covers CIP-0168, which proposes BuiltinValue functions giving Plutus contracts access to structured data types that are currently expensive to encode manually. The combined goal is to reduce the cost of writing correct, efficient Plutus contracts by improving the underlying platform rather than requiring developers to work around its limitations. VacuumLabs, a Bratislava-based engineering firm with an established record of Cardano contributions, is the primary collaborating organization. Lead is Ziyang Liu. ## 6. Capital Without Compromise (Pogun) — ₳12,290,000 Governance action on Cexplorer Pogun, an IO-affiliated DeFi product team, is requesting ₳12,290,000 to build two related financial products on Cardano. The first is a Bitcoin bridge built using BitVM, a system that allows Bitcoin to enforce arbitrary computation through optimistic execution and challenge-response fraud proofs. The bridge uses a 1-of-N security model, meaning only one participant in the operator set needs to be honest to prevent theft, and incorporates Mithril-based verification alongside Groth16 zero-knowledge proofs to minimize trust assumptions. The second product is a peer-to-peer credit market allowing Bitcoin holders to use BTC as collateral for loans without relying on liquidation oracles. The design uses a definitive-default model where collateral is only at risk when a borrower has definitively failed to repay, which IO argues removes the vulnerability to price manipulation that affects oracle-dependent lending protocols. Notably, Pogun has committed to returning 20% of EBITDA to the treasury until the full ₳12.29 million is repaid, and 5% of EBITDA in perpetuity thereafter, making this the only proposal in the batch that includes a treasury repayment mechanism. The Product Committee includes Pi Lanningham, Philip DiSarro, Lucas Rosa, and Santiago Carmuega. ## 7. L2 Scalability Initiative — ₳10,425,871 Governance action on Cexplorer IO and Midgard Labs submitted a joint proposal requesting ₳10,425,871 for Layer 2 infrastructure across three workstreams. The largest portion funds continued development of Hydra, IO's Layer 2 state channel protocol enabling sub-second transaction finality and near-zero fees for known-participant environments. A smaller allocation funds early-stage development of Midgard, a permissionless optimistic rollup targeting up to 10,000 transactions per second. The remainder covers shared L2 tooling and standards not specific to either protocol. Unlike Hydra, Midgard does not require participants to be known in advance, making it suitable for open applications where user membership is unpredictable. IO frames the two as complementary: Hydra for known-party, low-latency use cases such as payment channels and gaming; Midgard for open, high-throughput applications that cannot yet run at acceptable cost on Layer 1. Lead is Sharan Konerira. ## 8. Blockfrost Maintenance and Next Generation Indexing — ₳7,916,666 Governance action on Cexplorer Blockfrost, the indexing and API service that the proposal states handles approximately 90% of free-tier Cardano API traffic, is requesting ₳7,916,666 split across engineering, security audits, and operations and infrastructure. The maintenance portion covers the ongoing cost of running the service, keeping it current with node updates, and maintaining the open API specification that downstream developers rely on. The next-generation indexing component, internally referred to as Project Cayley, proposes a decentralized architecture for distributed slice indexing. Rather than requiring each node or service to maintain a full index of the entire chain, Project Cayley distributes the indexing workload so that individual participants store and serve only the portions of the chain relevant to their use case. The goal is to reduce the infrastructure barrier for operating a Cardano indexing service and prevent the emergence of a single centralized dependency for chain data access. ## 9. Developer Experience Initiative — ₳3,601,926 Governance action on Cexplorer The smallest of the nine proposals requests ₳3,601,926 to improve the tooling and documentation available to developers building on Cardano. The proposal covers three areas: a cardano-init command-line tool that automates project setup by scaffolding the appropriate directory structure, dependencies, and configuration files; a contracts library providing reusable, audited smart contract primitives; and a unified documentation portal consolidating technical references currently spread across multiple repositories and websites. The proposal frames the current developer onboarding experience as a measurable barrier to adoption. The cardano-init tool is modeled on similar scaffolding utilities common in other development environments and is intended to reduce setup time from hours to minutes. Lead is Robertino Martinez, with TxPipe and Intersect listed as collaborating organizations. ## Community Sentiment Early reaction on X is mixed, with a clear divide between those acknowledging the reduced ask as a positive signal and those demanding deeper scrutiny before approving. On the supportive side, several accounts have highlighted the 50% budget reduction and the sharper focus on high-impact work like Leios and the Bitcoin bridge as evidence that IO is responding to governance feedback. The Pogun revenue share model in particular has drawn praise from some as a welcome step toward treasury-conscious design in DeFi proposals. The more critical voices, which include active DReps, builders, and long-time community members, are raising several distinct concerns. Questions have been raised about for-profit entities such as Pogun and Blockfrost drawing from the community treasury. Others point to the absence of live mainnet products for certain previously funded initiatives, with Leios and Midgard cited specifically, as reason to withhold approval until delivery history improves. Concerns about ADA sell pressure from large treasury withdrawals and the broader sustainability of heavy treasury spending are also surfacing. The overall mood is not outright rejection but a clear demand for rigor. The scaled-back number is broadly acknowledged as a step in the right direction, but skepticism around execution history and opportunity cost remains high. ## Context IO states it evaluated more than 25 initiatives before selecting these nine, and has committed to publishing the proposals that did not make the cut alongside the reasoning for their exclusion. The 50% budget reduction from the prior cycle is described as deliberate and directional, with IO stating its goal is to reduce its treasury ask significantly each year as more work moves to specialist partners and the ecosystem becomes less dependent on any single organization. It is also worth noting that these nine proposals were submitted directly on-chain rather than through the Intersect budget process currently running in parallel. The Intersect framework is optional and proposers may submit treasury withdrawal actions independently through Cardano's standard governance mechanisms, which is the path IO has taken here. DReps are therefore navigating two separate funding tracks at the same time. Voting on all nine proposals is open until May 24, 2026. Nine proposals covering a wide range of technical work is a lot to digest. We hope this summary makes it easier to understand what is being proposed and why before casting a vote or forming an opinion. For the full detail on any individual proposal, each governance action links directly to the on-chain submission. The full portfolio overview is available at momentum.cardano.iog.io .