In a detailed address, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson outlined the funding strategy for the ecosystem in 2026, focusing on rebalancing investments across infrastructure, utility, and user experience. He identified current funding as overly concentrated on infrastructure, proposed strategic investments in decentralized applications, and emphasized the need for the ecosystem to invest in itself to attract external capital. Hoskinson also detailed specific financial models and operational conditions for projects seeking funding.
Charles Hoskinson has provided insights into how funding for the Cardano ecosystem will function in 2026. In a recently released hour-long video, he outlined critical pressure points and the team’s plans to tackle them.
Hoskinson stated that ecosystem funding is broken into infrastructure, utility, and experience layers. He said historical funding has been overrepresented in infrastructure and underrepresented in utility and experience modules.
Infrastructure includes nodes like Ouroboros Leios, Plutus, and Aiken. Hoskinson pointed out that running a node team costs between $1 million and $5 million per year, requiring 10 to 40 full-time engineers.
He recommends funding three mature node projects, unified by Project Bluepring plus Hydra. The utility layer involves what users can do, such as building decentralized applications within the broader DeFi ecosystem.
Acknowledging an unfavorable current state, Hoskinson proposes funding utility with conditions like oversight and salary cuts. Strategic goals for funded dApps include Bitcoin DeFi via the Pogan protocol and upgrading for privacy with Midnight.
The investment model involves creating a weighted index of project tokens. The treasury would purchase 10-30% of each project’s total supply within that index.
A portion of protocol revenue must be used to buy ADA and donate it back to the treasury. “There’s nothing here that, with the money that we have, Cardano can’t fix,” said Hoskinson while outlining critical flaws.
For the experience layer, funding is needed to rebuild ambassador programs and improve user onboarding. Hoskinson said the ecosystem requires 20 to 30 high-value hackathons annually to improve developer experience.
He outlined that fragmented treasury proposals create a “race to the bottom.” The strategy for attracting external capital must be unified, with the ecosystem willing to invest in itself.
