Input Output Cuts Cardano Budget 52% to ₱2.83 billion ($46.8 million)
Input Output Global is shifting Cardano development toward external contractors like Midgard Labs and VacuumLabs, slashing its own treasury request to ₱2.83 billion ($46.8 million) for 2026 operations. The nine funding proposals prioritize scaling infrastructure and a Bitcoin-focused decentralized finance engine called Pogun.
Key Takeaway
Input Output's budget cut shifts Cardano development to contractors while betting on Bitcoin DeFi growth.
Input Output Global wants ₱2.83 billion ($46.8 million) from Cardano's community treasury for 2026 operations, down from ₱5.9 billion ($97.5 million) approved for 2025.
The 52% budget cut signals a deliberate pivot. External contractors like Midgard Labs and VacuumLabs will inherit protocol development, reducing Input Output's direct role in core blockchain work. The nine proposals prioritize scaling infrastructure and a Bitcoin-focused decentralized finance engine called Pogun.
Cardano's Leios consensus upgrade dominates the technical roadmap. The protocol shift targets 1,000 transactions per second through committee-based validation and endorser blocks, a 10 to 65 times increase over the current 7 to 10 transactions per second. Mainnet release candidate expected by year-end 2026.
Pogun aims to turn Bitcoin into productive collateral on Cardano through bilateral credit agreements that avoid volatile oracles and forced liquidations. A non-margin credit market launches in Q2 2026, followed by yield-generating applications in Q3 and a BitVM-powered bridge in Q4. The bridge uses a 1-of-N security model requiring only one honest operator to safeguard funds.
Cardano's EUTXO accounting model shares direct lineage with Bitcoin's transaction architecture, making it a natural fit for cross-chain DeFi applications. Midgard, a permissionless optimistic rollup, targets one-cent Layer-2 transaction costs using single-party fraud proofs. Combined with Hydra's state channels for sub-second micropayments, the infrastructure stack aims to scale Cardano from 800,000 monthly transactions today to 27 million under Vision 2030 milestones.
Cardano's current mainnet finality sits at 2 hours, a bottleneck the Leios upgrade intends to compress alongside throughput gains by Q4 2026.
This article was written based on reporting from CryptoSlate.
