TL;DR
- IOG submitted nine treasury proposals for 2026, with a scaled-back ask centered on Leios, developer experience, and core Cardano upgrades.
- The roadmap reflects a sharper focus after Acropolis and tiered pricing were halted and ₳4.1 million was returned to the treasury for reallocation.
- Community review and voting now determine whether Cardano funds a leaner plan built around visible mainnet progress, governance accountability, and near-term execution discipline for the year ahead.
Input Output Global has submitted nine treasury proposals for 2026, narrowing Cardano’s spending agenda around the upgrades it believes matter most next. The striking part is not only the number of proposals, but the decision to ask for less while concentrating attention on deliverables tied to performance and usability. The package centers on Leios, developer experience, and core protocol work, and arrives as Cardano teams finalize the proposals for community review and voting.
That framing matters because the roadmap is no longer trying to push every idea forward at once. IOG is signaling that Cardano’s 2026 push will be judged less by breadth and more by whether it can turn years of research into gains on mainnet. Leios sits at the center of that bet. Intersect’s technical roadmap describes it as a scaling design meant to raise throughput by orders of magnitude as transaction demand and block utilization press against current limits. At the same time, IOG has redirected resources away from Acropolis and tiered pricing, returning ₳4.1 million to the treasury after concluding that newer Leios research made the earlier pricing path obsolete.
IO’s 2026 treasury proposals are now live.
We’re submitting nine proposals this year, with a funding ask just under 50% of last year’s, and a clear focus on getting the job done.
With Leios testnet arriving in June and mainnet targeted by the end of 2026, the slate delivers the… pic.twitter.com/Lt7I9DHoNE
— Input Output Group (@IOGroup) April 22, 2026
The 2026 plan is being built around fewer, sharper priorities
The proposals are broad enough to cover Cardano’s stack, but focused enough to reveal a hierarchy. Nine proposals span protocol maintenance, consensus, upgrades, scaling, developer experience, smart contracts, and related work, yet the strategic weight sits on the pieces that can make Cardano faster to use and easier to build on. The Leios testnet is expected in June, while the same development cycle also points toward the van Rossem hard fork and node improvements meant to strengthen performance, ledger consistency, and security. Read together, the proposals look like an attempt to link treasury spending directly to milestones the market can track.
That is why these submissions matter beyond budgeting. They read like a disciplined reset in how Cardano wants to fund itself: spend less, ship more, and make every treasury ask easier to defend in public. The next stage depends on community scrutiny and on-chain governance, but IOG’s message is clear. If Cardano is going to justify treasury support, it wants Leios, tooling, and infrastructure to carry the burden of proof. In a network that now governs its future directly, that is a shift in tone.
