TechFlow News, April 23: According to CoinDesk, Cardano’s core development company Input Output has submitted nine funding proposals totaling $46.8 million for 2026 to the community treasury—representing a sharp reduction of approximately 52% compared to last year’s $97.5 million. This marks Input Output’s first step toward gradually reducing its reliance on community funds.
The nine proposals center on two key initiatives: First, the consensus upgrade Leios, expected to boost Cardano’s transaction processing capacity by 10–65x and target throughput exceeding 1,000 transactions per second (TPS); testing is scheduled for June, with full deployment planned by year-end. Second, the Bitcoin DeFi system Pogun, enabling Bitcoin holders to engage in lending and yield-generating activities via Cardano without entrusting assets to centralized custodians; the lending functionality is slated for public release in Q2.
Voting is conducted by approximately 1,000 democratically elected representatives (DReps), with the voting period closing on May 24. The outcome will test whether the Cardano community now views Input Output as an ordinary funding applicant. Meanwhile, Cardano’s newly launched stablecoin USDCx has achieved a circulating supply of 14.6 million tokens within weeks of launch, while the network’s total value locked (TVL) has risen from $137.5 million to $142.7 million.
