Cardano (ADA) founder Charles Hoskinson laid out a three-layer funding strategy for 2026 in a video address, proposing direct treasury investment in ecosystem projects, salary cuts for grant recipients, and a target of 20 to 30 hackathons per year to reverse what he described as unfavorable metrics in user activity, total value locked, and transaction volume.
What Happened: Funding Overhaul Proposed
Hoskinson broke the ecosystem's funding needs into three categories: infrastructure, utility, and experience. He said Cardano has historically overspent on infrastructure — including node teams like Ouroboros Leios, Plutus, and Aiken — while underinvesting in the other two.
Running a node team costs between $1 million and $5 million annually and requires 10 to 40 full-time engineers, he said.
Hoskinson recommended funding three mature node projects — Haskell, Rust, and Go, unified by Project Bluepring — along with Hydra and programming languages like Aiken and Plutus.
For the utility layer, Hoskinson proposed creating a weighted index of project tokens, with the treasury purchasing 10% to 30% of each included project's total supply. Funded projects would face conditions including oversight requirements, operating expense reductions, and salary cuts.
Strategic goals for funded dApps include Bitcoin (BTC) DeFi through the Pogan protocol, hybrid integration with Midnight for privacy, and a requirement that 10% of protocol revenue be used to buy ADA and return it to the treasury. "There's nothing here that, with the money that we have, Cardano can't fix," Hoskinson said.
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Why It Matters: Self-Investment Urged
Hoskinson argued that Cardano must invest in itself to attract outside capital. He described fragmented, competitive treasury proposals as creating a "race to the bottom" and called for a unified strategy instead.
The experience layer — wallets, account abstraction, and on/off ramps — also needs funding to rebuild ambassador and key opinion leader networks and improve user onboarding, he said. Investments in the token index are expected to pay for themselves within one to three years as the treasury sells its appreciating holdings.
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