Cardano Foundation Roadmap

Six major points will guide the Foundation’s activities in the near to mid future

The Cardano Foundation is thrilled to announce the next phase of our roadmap for global Cardano adoption. We will continue to work together with the ecosystem and several community and institutional partners to successfully implement this plan.

While we remain committed to our existing mission of Cardano adoption by legacy enterprises, and will also continue our blockchain for good initiatives, we will simultaneously further increase our efforts in the decentralized finance (DeFi) and Web3 sectors.

The above timeline provides an overview of the Foundation’s priorities since 2023. It also gives a snapshot of how this strategy has been evolving.

This blog post shares details about the six major updates we're making to our roadmap.

1. Boosting Cardano DeFi

Cardano holds substantial untapped potential in the DeFi user experience. Aside from our existing work on DeFi-focused Cardano tooling, operational exchange and intermediary support, our revamped DeFi roadmap will address the following additional goals:

Firstly, the Cardano Foundation will provide an eight-figure ada amount in liquidity to key Cardano stablecoin projects through multiple channels. Although not part of the Foundation’s original mission, we recognize the need for such an initiative to improve the on- and off-ramps into Cardano. We expect to see the impacts of this effort unfold over the next six to twelve months.

Secondly, we will continue to support and collaborate with community initiatives aimed at increasing Cardano DeFi liquidity and adoption (e.g., the Stablecoin DeFi Liquidity Budget proposal). This is a long-term approach that may be subject to iterations until approved by the Cardano community, and we believe that the data we collect with our own efforts will serve to improve such proposals further.

2. Cardano x Web3

Closely connected to DeFi is the fact that Cardano needs to improve its rate of Web3 adoption. While some challenges arise from Cardano’s technical uniqueness and related complexity and costs compared e.g. to EVM infrastructures, we agree with those calling for more action. Therefore we are adding two team members to the Foundation’s Web3 adoption team. Their focus will be on integrations, listings, real-world assets (RWA), and more.

3. Cardano Venture Hub

This year the Foundation piloted the Cardano Venture Hub. The program aims to tackle some of the funding challenges across the Cardano ecosystem, and has already supported three projects to take their next steps.

Built on the lessons learned from the pilot program earlier this year, we will scale up the Venture Hub to feature a Venture Program for startups, plus an Enterprise Enablement Program for established businesses.

We aim to bootstrap the sustainability of the Cardano projects in the Venture Hub through direct investments and loans, technical advisory services, coaching, network advisory consultancy, integration support, and other business critical solutions. The Cardano Foundation is committing up to 2 million ada to the Venture Hub in 2026.

At the same time, we will continue collaborating with our partners at Draper U, Techstars, and CV VC to support their upcoming budget requests focused on expanding Cardano adoption. The Venture Hub complements these efforts, and we will work together whenever possible to maximize our collective impact.

4. Unlocking RWA

Cardano is well-suited for the RWA space, thanks to its advantages such as native assets, deterministic fees, sustainable footprint and sophisticated developer community.

We have already announced the launch of US$10M in RWA on Cardano yesterday, thanks to our collaboration with MembersCap.

To grow RWA further, we have to address Cardano standards. In particular, we need to bring interoperable, programmable tokens to Cardano. This means getting CIP-0113 and CIP-0143 completed and promoting their implementation as quickly as possible.

We will also be working with the Masumi team to adopt the latest payments framework x402 on Cardano, which is particularly applicable to agent-to-agent payments challenges. This internet-native solution means anyone can use Web3 and pay in a simple, seamless way that doesn’t complicate the user experience.

5. Cardano Promotion

The Cardano Foundation has dedicated considerable effort over recent years to enhancing Cardano's reputation and promotion in the traditional enterprise and public sectors, as well as with regulators across various jurisdictions.

The Cardano Academy ensures anyone has free access to comprehensive blockchain education, both with in-depth and short, thematic courses. The Cardano Summit and enterprise masterclasses are helping to bring traditional players into blockchain. And other streams such as media relations, event participation, or multi-channel marketing contribute to consolidating Cardano as a mature chain, ready for anyone to use.

Given the numerous changes in the industry and regulatory landscape over the past twelve months, we will increase our marketing budget. In 2026, we will grow our total demand generation budget by 12%, expanding existing efforts within inbound marketing, content, paid marketing, media, and events.

The marketing teams will also continue working with the ecosystem to develop strategic programs that promote global Cardano awareness and adoption. We will highlight the Cardano blockchain itself as well as multiple Cardano projects. This will include, for example, Cardano booths at TOKEN2049 and Consensus, collaborating with community groups to run the Africa Tech Summit 2026 as well as the Digital Asset 2026 event in London, or having an integrated plan for developers onboarding that brings together technical people from various projects and provides post-hackathon support.

6. Increased Governance Decentralization

Cardano needs more involved and informed governance actors.

Building on our successful delegation of 140M ada to seven Builder DReps, we are expanding the initiative by empowering Adoption and Operations DReps.

To achieve this, we will delegate a further 220M ada to eleven selected DReps from these two new categories. In order to do so, we will reduce our DRep self-delegation to 80M ada. Details on the assessment methodology will follow in a future post.

Necessary changes to make it happen

Fully implementing the six points outlined above comes at significant resource demand and constitutes a material change in how the Cardano Foundation operates. To ensure the Foundation’s financial sustainability for the period required, we are sunsetting our current SPO delegation strategy by delegating to our own Cardano Foundation pools, that we fully pledge, over the next few months.

After five years of the current delegation framework, we will shift more of our efforts from bootstrapping Cardano SPOs to accelerating the larger Cardano ecosystem. We understand that this change will affect the currently delegated SPOs, and we will continue working with them and offering support wherever possible. We also want to thank the almost 400 pools that received a delegation from the Foundation and carried forward the mission of decentralization.

The Cardano Foundation will continue to operate with transparency, revisiting our roadmap and strategy in light of new developments.

From video spotlights to marketing community project case studies, or from revamping the Cardano Developer Portal to motivating institutional SPOs and providing governance tooling, many initiatives within the six roadmap points have already been implemented.

A lot more will follow over the next three years.

Rolling out the full scope of this roadmap will take some time. But we are confident this integrated, collaborative approach will contribute significantly to the future growth of Cardano.

A final shout-out to the almost 400 pools that received Cardano Foundation delegation:

314, 0AAAA, 100X, 1JPN, 1LOVE, 1STKE, 21ADA, 247, 4CHAN, 4WARD, 9000, A4G, AAA, ABBA, ABC, ABLE, ACA, ADA, ADACT, ADAGL, ADALY, ADAOZ, ADAPH, ADAPT, ADAR, ADASH, ADATA, ADAU, ADAVZ, ADI, ADNT, ADP, ADRIA, AGIO, AHL, AIJOU, AIM, AION, AKIBA, ALLI, ALPHA, ALPS, AMAR, AMINT, AMKT1, ANCO, ANFRA, ANP, ANQA, ANVIL, AOAUS, AOS, APEX, APOOL, AQUA, ARKA, ARM1, ARMN, ARRA, ARRK, ART, ASING, ASKP, ASN, ASSET, ASTOR, ATLAS, ATM, ATM1, AUSST, AUTO, AVENE, AWARE, AXIOS, AZTEC, AZUL, BABEL, BACK, BAK, BALNC, BBFSH, BBHMM, BBO, BEAVR, BERRY, BFADA, BIO, bio, BIRD, BKIND, BLKBX, BLOC, BLOXB, BNTY1, BOBA, BODHI, BOOST, BPOOL, BRAIN, BRAVE, BRAVO, BREW, BRLN, BROTH, BUDZ, BUFFY, BULPR, BYADA, BZONE, C3ETH, CAN1, CAPEX, CARBO, CARDS, CASP, CBH, CCIO, CCYT, CENT, CFLOW, CHARM, CHEF, CHESS, CHIL, CHRTY, CJ01, CLAY, CLIO1, CO2P, COAST, CORE, COSD, CPU, CPX, CRDNS, CRFA, CRFN, CROWN, CRPL, CRS, CRTX, CSCS, CSN1, CSR, CYOX, CYPOQ, D360, DADA, DEN, DEV, DEW, DIGI, DINGO, DIO, DMOON, DOXA, DSIO, DUTCH, EASY1, ECO, ENDVR, EPOCH, ESP, EU01, EVT, FALCO, FFR, FIDA, FIKA, FIRE, FLOWR, FOX, FRADA, FRCAN, FREE, FRITZ, FROG, FRUIT, GENKI, GHISX, GINGR, GISK1, GLOBE, GMBL, GOT, GRC1, GROOT, GROW, HAZEL, HEART, HEDGE, HERO, HEX, HIPPO, HIVE, HOARD, HODLR, HONEY, HRBR, HYPE, ICRYP, IDEAL, INDIE, INFI, ISR, ITZA, IWH, JNGL, JUNO, K9K, KAKE1, KARMA, KIND, KING1, KORA, KROM, LACE, LAGO, LAKE, LAMB, LAMP, LATAM, LATSP, LEVI, LGBTQ, LIDO, lido, LIFE, LIFT, LINUX, LOCO, LOGIC, LOOT, LORDB, LOVE, LOXE, LPR, LSS, LUNA, MAG, MALU, MAML, MANA, MDS, MNKY, MNM, MOAI, MONAD, MOXIE, Moxie, NANI, NASEC, NAUT, NECTR, NEO, NEURO, NFTY, NINJA, NOMAD, NORB, NUFI, NUTS, NVSTX, ODIN, OHOH7, ONE, one, ORCA, ORKA, ORPH, OTG, OWL, PANL, PARAD, PEACE, PEGA, PHRCK, PIADA, pixel, PKADA, PMW, POEM, POF, POKER, POLAR, POOLS, POS, PrepU, PRIDE, PRO, PROM, PSYA, QADAO, QCPOL, QXT, RADAR, RARE, RDLRT, RIOT, RIVER, RSV, RUG, SAFE, SAGE, SAKE, SALAD, SALT, SANP, SEED, SEGV, SHA, SHARP, SHIFT, SILVR, SION, SJG, SMART, SMAUG, SMMT, SNAKE, SNSKY, SOLIA, SOLPI, SoPHi, SPACE, SPIDR, SPRTA, SQUID, ST3EAK, ST4NA, STAT, STKH1, STKPL, STLL, SUMN, SWAG, SWARM, SWEET, TAILS, TANGO, TBO, TETON, THOR, THRIV, TIA, TIG, TMS, TNTM, TOAST, TOBA, TOPO, TORO, TREK, TROUT, TRU, TSS, TTS17, TWIN1, TYGAR, UBQT, UNDR, UNION, UNIQ, UPSTR, VEGAS, VEGN, VIBE, VICE, VILAI, VINCE, VIPER, VITAL, VJRAS, W4ADA, WAAUS, WADA, WELL, WHITE, WINE, WIRED, WISH, WOLV, WOOF, WRLP, XORN, XSTAR, YOADA, YOON, ZELDA, ZETIC, ZONE, ZW3RK

Frederik Gregaard
Chief Executive Officer