Charles Hoskinson says Cardano’s 2026 budget debate is no longer really about whether the ecosystem should fund itself, but how. In a March 10 video, the Cardano founder argued the network has spent too long overweighting infrastructure while underinvesting in the applications, user experience and narrative needed to turn technical capacity into adoption.
“Historically, Catalyst and the Cardano treasury was over represented here and under represented here,” he said, referring to infrastructure versus utility and experience. “Not enough money for experiences, not enough money for utility […] there’s not a lot of money for the content creators. There’s not a lot of money for the people actually building the interfaces into Cardano utilities.”
That imbalance, in Hoskinson’s telling, now collides with a harsher reality: many applications are not performing well enough to sustain themselves. He pointed to monthly active users, total value locked, daily transactions and revenue as the relevant scorecard, then delivered a blunt assessment of the current state of the ecosystem.
“All of these on Cardano, they’re not doing well. You’re lying if you say they are,” he said. “There are a lot of DApps and DeFi in the Cardano ecosystem that are losing money. They don’t have a lot of users. They don’t have a lot of TVL.”
Cardano Must Rethink Funding In 2026His proposed solution is not more grants in the traditional sense, but a treasury-backed investment structure. Rather than handing out what he called “free money,” Hoskinson suggested Cardano create a weighted index of selected ecosystem tokens, with the treasury taking ownership stakes in funded projects. In return, those projects would accept oversight, operating expense reductions, strategic alignment, and partial revenue-sharing back to the treasury through ADA purchases.
“No free money. Sorry, that’s bad behavior,” he said. “It is a strategic investment. You give something, you get something.” He added that the treasury’s goal would be to recoup the initial outlay over time as usage and valuations improve, saying the investment could potentially “pay itself back probably one to three years.”
That model also implies a more politically difficult step: consolidation. Hoskinson argued Cardano cannot support large numbers of similar products at current adoption levels, particularly across DeFi. “We can’t have 25 DEXs at our current adoption level in volume. It’s not sustainable,” he said. “There needs to be a consolidation by category one to three. And that’s what you have when you pick winners and losers.”
The broader message was that the governance system now faces a practical test. Hoskinson said the ecosystem must stop treating every treasury request as a fragmented bidding war and start acting with coordinated intent. “It’s not an infrastructure game anymore,” he said near the end of the broadcast. “It’s a utility and experience game.”
At press time, ADA traded at $0.2590.
