Cardano’s new roadmap: what the latest treasury proposals are funding

Cardano’s latest governance season has been dominated by heated debates around the treasury. But behind the drama, a set of major proposals has been approved that effectively form a new roadmap for the chain. These initiatives aim to boost scalability, improve user and developer experience, harden security, and prepare Cardano for the next decade.

Hydra and the push for real scalability

One of the biggest funded initiatives is the IO consensus proposal centered around Hydra, Cardano’s key layer-2 style scaling solution. Hydra is designed to let Cardano handle far more activity without sacrificing decentralization or pricing out smaller stake pool operators.

The goal is to increase throughput by roughly 10x to 65x. Today, a lot of the system sits idle during block propagation, which keeps transactions per second (TPS) lower than they could be. Hydra tackles this by introducing parallel processing, allowing more of the network to work at the same time instead of waiting in sequence.

The challenge is scaling without forcing stake pool operators to buy expensive hardware. If running a pool becomes too costly, smaller operators shut down and decentralization suffers. This initiative is about finding that balance: more throughput, but still accessible to independent operators.

Hydra moving from testnet-style experimentation toward mainnet readiness is crucial if Cardano wants a more vibrant DeFi ecosystem and the capacity to support real-world use cases. It also builds on, rather than replaces, the community-driven funding model pioneered by Project Catalyst.

Cardano upgrades: accounts, multi-asset treasury, and Babel fees

Another major proposal, the Cardano upgrades initiative, bundles several important changes aimed at making the chain more flexible and user-friendly.

CIP-159: smarter account addresses and small payments

CIP-159 introduces account address enhancements that remove some of the current limitations around how wallets and dApps handle small payments. In practice, this can:

• Unlock new revenue models for wallets and apps
• Reduce costs for batchers and aggregators
• Provide building blocks for future layer-2 solutions and advanced applications

For users, this should translate into more creative wallet features, new product types, and smoother payment flows that aren’t constantly bumping into protocol-level constraints.

Multi-asset treasury: beyond ADA-only budgeting

Right now, Cardano’s treasury is fundamentally tied to ADA. That makes budgeting difficult because you’re planning everything around a single volatile asset. The multi-asset treasury concept changes this by allowing treasury reserves and future budgeting mechanisms to support multiple asset types, including stablecoins.

This could allow the treasury to convert some gains into stablecoins during bull markets, making long-term planning less chaotic. It also opens the door to more sophisticated financial management, rather than being locked into ADA-only exposure.

Babel fees: paying transaction costs in other tokens

Babel fees are an idea that has been discussed in the Cardano community for years: letting users pay transaction fees in tokens other than ADA. If fully implemented at the protocol level, this could dramatically improve onboarding and usability.

Imagine:

• A Bitcoin user moving over to Cardano and paying fees in BTC instead of first acquiring ADA
• Meme coins on Cardano becoming “gas tokens,” giving them real utility beyond speculation
• Games using their own in-game token to cover transaction fees, so players never need to touch ADA

Fluid Tokens has already implemented a form of Babel fees on mainnet, but it requires users to keep a small amount of ADA as collateral. IO’s work aims to remove or reduce those constraints so that dApps can truly pay fees in stablecoins or other tokens without that hidden ADA requirement.

High-assurance security and formal verification

Smart contract bugs and exploits regularly drain hundreds of millions of dollars across the crypto space. As AI tools make it easier to find vulnerabilities, the cost of insecure code will only increase. Cardano’s high assurance technical collaboration proposal doubles down on security by making formal verification more accessible.

The initiative has two main workstreams:

• Expanding IOHK’s Plutus verification tool from checking individual contracts to verifying entire dApps, with better tooling to spot vulnerabilities before deployment and support for multiple Cardano smart contract languages.
• Providing a pre-configured development environment that bundles testing, analysis, verification, and profiling tools, so teams can get a high-assurance setup without wrestling with complex configurations.

This is not just an IOHK solo effort. It involves ecosystem teams like Midgard Labs, TxPipe, Harmonic Labs, Lentera, Saib, and others, reflecting Cardano’s broader focus on rigorous, research-driven security.

Plutus and developer experience: making Cardano easier to build on

Another funded proposal focuses on Plutus, Cardano’s smart contract platform, and is being delivered together with Vacuum Labs. Developers have long said that building on Cardano has improved but can still feel harder than it should be. This proposal attacks that problem from multiple angles.

The goals include:

• Making Plutus faster and more efficient, so smart contracts are cheaper to run
• Strengthening safety through better testing and formal verification
• Improving the overall developer experience, from tooling to workflows

Alongside this, the developer experience initiative targets better onboarding, cleaner development environments, and smoother workflows. The core idea is simple: developers are users too. If developers enjoy building on Cardano, the ecosystem naturally attracts more apps, liquidity, and users.

For more context on how these changes fit into Cardano’s broader scaling vision, it’s worth looking at how the upcoming Leios upgrade aims to address the blockchain trilemma of scalability, security, and decentralization in parallel with these tooling improvements. You can dive deeper into that in this detailed look at Cardano’s Leios upgrade.

Maintenance: keeping the core infrastructure healthy

The maintenance initiative might sound less exciting than new features, but it’s essential. This proposal covers everything that keeps Cardano running smoothly under the hood: bug fixes, disaster recovery planning, knowledge sharing, security reviews, infrastructure maintenance, and performance optimizations.

Every upgrade mentioned in this roadmap depends on a solid, well-maintained base layer. Without continuous maintenance, even the most ambitious features can become fragile or unreliable.

Cardano Vision 2026: long-term research and innovation

Beyond immediate upgrades, the Cardano Vision 2026 research proposal lays out a long-term innovation pipeline. Instead of focusing on one specific feature, it funds research into the technologies Cardano may need over the next 5–10 years.

Scalability research

On the scalability front, the research will explore:

• Layered architectures and layer-2 infrastructure (including Leios)
• Zero-knowledge (ZK) based scaling and data availability solutions
• Sharding and other advanced techniques for boosting throughput

The aim is to keep increasing capacity without compromising decentralization, even as usage and on-chain activity grow.

User experience and light clients

User experience research will look into:

• Light clients that make it easier to use Cardano securely on mobile and low-resource devices
• Decentralized APIs that reduce reliance on centralized infrastructure
• Better developer tooling and intent-based transactions
• Deeper work on Babel fees and related UX improvements

Some of these topics, like Babel fees and Leios, also appear in other proposals. The difference is that those initiatives focus on building and shipping, while Vision 2026 focuses on long-term research and refinement.

Stake pool incentives and new responsibilities

As Cardano evolves, stake pool operators (SPOs) may be asked to take on more responsibilities beyond block production, such as participating in Mithril, Leios, and other infrastructure services. Vision 2026 includes research into whether the current incentive model still makes sense under these conditions and how rewards might need to evolve to support a healthy, decentralized SPO ecosystem.

Interoperability, identity, and post-quantum security

The proposal also allocates research effort to:

• Interoperability: bridges, atomic swaps, and cross-chain connectivity
• Decentralized identity (DID) and governance improvements
• Post-quantum cryptography to prepare for future security threats

In short, Cardano Vision 2026 is about making sure the chain doesn’t just react to new challenges, but actively prepares for a future where user expectations, regulation, and the broader blockchain landscape look very different from today. This long-term mindset has already shaped how Cardano approaches treasury design and governance, as explored in this comparison of Cardano and Polkadot’s treasury models.

What this roadmap means for Cardano’s future

When you put all these funded proposals together, a clear roadmap emerges. Over the next few years, Cardano is aiming to:

• Scale significantly through Hydra, Leios, and future layer-2 solutions
• Improve user experience with features like Babel fees and account enhancements
• Make development faster, cheaper, and less painful through better tooling and environments
• Strengthen security with formal verification and high-assurance development practices
• Maintain a robust core infrastructure through continuous maintenance
• Invest heavily in long-term research around scalability, UX, interoperability, and security

You don’t have to agree with every funding decision to see the overall direction: Cardano is trying to become easier to build on, easier to use, more scalable, and more secure, while staying true to its research-first approach. If these initiatives deliver as planned, the network should be better positioned to support many more users, applications, and real economic activity in the years ahead.