Charles Hoskinson says the Cardano budget debate heading into 2026 isn’t about whether the ecosystem should fund itself anymore — it’s about how it does so.
In a March 10 video, the Cardano founder argued the network has spent years overinvesting in core infrastructure while shortchanging the layers that actually drive adoption: applications, user experience and narrative. That imbalance, he warned, helps explain why many projects on Cardano today aren’t financially sustainable.
Hoskinson broke the ecosystem into three layers: infrastructure (nodes, languages and scaling tech like Hydra), utility (DApps and the DeFi stack), and experience (wallets, onboarding, content and brand). “Historically, Catalyst and the Cardano treasury was over represented here and under represented here,” he said, pointing to an excessive focus on infrastructure at the expense of 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.”
He used hard metrics to make his point: monthly active users, total value locked (TVL), daily transactions and revenue. “All of these on Cardano, they’re not doing well. You’re lying if you say they are,” Hoskinson said bluntly. “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.”
Instead of more traditional grants, Hoskinson proposed a more disciplined, investment-style approach. He recommended the treasury adopt a weighted index of selected ecosystem tokens and take ownership stakes in projects it funds. Funded teams would accept more oversight, tighter operating expenses, strategic alignment and partial revenue-sharing back to the treasury — for example via ADA purchases. “No free money. Sorry, that’s bad behavior,” he said. “It is a strategic investment. You give something, you get something.” He believes the treasury could recoup its outlay as usage and valuations improve, potentially within one to three years.
That approach also implies consolidation. At current adoption levels, Hoskinson said Cardano can’t support dozens of overlapping projects — particularly in DeFi. “We can’t have 25 DEXs at our current adoption level in volume. It’s not sustainable,” he said. The investment model would naturally force “winners and losers” and shrink redundancy across categories.
He also pushed on the neglected experience layer: wallets, onboarding, marketing and creators. Cardano’s public narrative, he argued, has suffered from underfunded ambassadors and content creators, leaving the chain vulnerable to a negative perception. “Cardano is considered to be the uncool chain… Ghost chain. Nobody uses Cardano. Cardano is a dead project,” he said. “Why do you hear it? You hear it because there’s nobody on the other side of the argument.”
To convert technical capacity into real network activity, Hoskinson called for simpler onboarding, better wallets, stronger aggregators and more deliberate marketing. He recommended the project lean into strategic differentiation — such as Bitcoin-focused DeFi and privacy — rather than trying to beat larger rivals on cost, liquidity or sheer user count.
The broader message: governance now faces a practical test. The community must stop treating treasury requests as a fragmented bidding war and start acting with coordinated intent. “It’s not an infrastructure game anymore,” Hoskinson said. “It’s a utility and experience game.”
At press time, ADA traded at $0.2590.
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