Cardano’s Governance Vote Looms as Network Pursues Bitcoin DeFi and a 1,000 TPS Leap

Cardano's ADA drops 64% in a year, but development surges with a halved treasury request, Leios throughput upgrade, and Bitcoin-based DeFi project Pogun.

The Cardano ecosystem finds itself at an inflection point. While the ADA token languishes at $0.25 — roughly 64% below its level of a year ago and down around 30% since January — the development side is buzzing with activity. Core developer Input Output has submitted a dramatically leaner funding request to the community treasury, betting on Bitcoin-based decentralized finance and a major throughput upgrade to reignite growth. Yet the same week brought a stark reminder of the network’s challenges: its leading NFT marketplace is shutting down.

A Halved Budget and a New Financial Model

Input Output is asking for approximately $46.8 million from the Cardano community treasury for 2026, roughly half the $97.5 million it requested last year. The company has signaled its intention to gradually wean itself off community funds, aiming to achieve self-sufficiency through its own revenue streams. External developer groups, including Midgard Labs and VacuumLabs, are slated to take over significant portions of protocol development by the end of 2026.

The fate of this nine-part funding plan rests with roughly 1,000 elected delegates, known as DReps, who represent ADA holders. Voting is open until May 24. The outcome will serve as an early stress test for Cardano’s decentralized governance model, which now operates without dominant control from Input Output.

Leios: Targeting Solana-Level Speeds

The largest single budget item is dedicated to raw network performance. The consensus upgrade known as Leios is designed to boost Cardano’s transaction throughput to over 1,000 transactions per second — a 10- to 65-fold increase over current capacity, according to Input Output. That would put Cardano in the same league as Solana and the fastest Ethereum layer-2 networks.

The upgrade separates transaction validation from block production, a structural change aimed at unlocking massive parallel processing. A public testnet is scheduled for June, with a full mainnet release candidate expected by the end of the year. This is a cornerstone of the broader “Vision 2030” roadmap, which targets scaling monthly transactions from the current 800,000 to more than 27 million.

Pogun: Bringing Bitcoin Liquidity to Cardano

Alongside the scalability push, the network is expanding its use cases through a project called Pogun. The initiative aims to bring Bitcoin-based DeFi to Cardano, allowing Bitcoin holders to earn yields on their holdings or take out loans — all without surrendering custody to a centralized intermediary.

The rollout is phased. In the second quarter, a bilateral lending market will launch without a margin mechanism, letting lenders and borrowers negotiate terms directly. The third quarter will see a yield application for retail users, followed in the fourth quarter by a BitVM-based bridge using a 1-of-N security model: only a single honest operator is needed to guarantee the safety of transferred Bitcoin.

JPG Store Closes as NFT Sector Contracts

While the development side signals ambition, the NFT ecosystem is retreating. JPG Store, Cardano’s premier NFT marketplace since 2021, will permanently shut down on May 23, 2026. The team cited a lack of economic viability.

A restriction phase began on April 23: new listings, offers, and minting have been disabled, though existing purchases and cancellations remain possible. Users who logged in via social wallets must transfer their assets to standard Web3 wallets like Lace or Eternl within 30 days. The closure follows a broader industry trend — Nifty Gateway shut down in February 2026, and Immutable followed shortly after.

Signs of Life in DeFi

Despite the NFT headwinds, there are glimmers of traction in decentralized finance. The recently launched Cardano stablecoin USDCx reached a circulating supply of 14.6 million tokens within weeks of its debut. Total value locked on the network has climbed to $142.7 million.

Whether these metrics are enough to shift the narrative will become clearer after the governance vote concludes on May 24. For now, Cardano is navigating a period of structural tension — ambitious technical upgrades on one side, a depressed token price and a shrinking NFT sector on the other.