Charles Hoskinson said that the discussion about Cardano’s 2026 budget is no longer about whether the ecosystem itself should be funded, but how. In a March 10 video, the Cardano founder argued that the network spends too much time overestimating its infrastructure and underinvests in the applications, user experience, and narrative needed to translate technical capabilities into adoption.
Hoskinson organized the ecosystem into three layers: infrastructure, utilities, and experience. Infrastructure covers the core rails like nodes, languages, and scaling components like Hydra, utilities are the actual DApp and DeFi stacks, and experience is the user-facing layer for wallets, onboarding, content, and branding. His argument was that Cardano has historically been too biased towards the first category.
“Historically, Catalyst and Cardano Treasury have been overrepresented here and underrepresented here,” he said, referring to infrastructure versus utilities and experiences. “There’s not enough money for experiences. There’s not enough money for utilities (…) There’s not a lot of money for content creators. There’s not a lot of money for the people who are actually building the interfaces to Cardano utilities.”
Hoskinson said that imbalance now collides with the harsher reality that many applications aren’t performing well enough to sustain themselves. He gave a frank assessment of the current state of the ecosystem, pointing to monthly active users, total value locked, daily transactions and revenue as relevant scorecards.
“All this stuff on Cardano is not working. I would be lying if I said it was working,” he said. “There are a lot of loss-making DApps and DeFi in the Cardano ecosystem. They don’t have a lot of users. They don’t have a lot of TVL.”
Cardano needs to rethink funding in 2026
The solution he proposes is not more subsidies in the traditional sense, but a state-backed investment structure. Rather than handing out what he called “free money,” Hoskinson proposed to Cardano that the Treasury Department take ownership of the funded projects and create a weighted index of selected ecosystem tokens. In return, these projects would accept oversight, reduced operating costs, strategic adjustments, and a portion of the proceeds from ADA purchases returned to the state treasury.
“There’s no free money. I’m sorry, but that’s bad behavior,” he said. “This is a strategic investment. When you give something, you get something back.” He added that Treasury’s goal is to recoup the initial outlay over time as usage and ratings improve, and said the investment could “probably be recouped in one to three years.”
This model also suggests the politically more difficult step of integration. Hoskinson argued that Cardano, at its current level of adoption, cannot support a large number of similar products, especially across DeFi. “At the current level of adoption, it is not possible to hold large amounts of 25 DEXs. It is not sustainable,” he said. “Categories 1 to 3 need to be integrated. That’s what we need to do to determine the winners and losers.”
Along with its usefulness, Hoskinson spent considerable time on what he described as Cardano’s neglected experience layer. He said the ecosystem has failed to provide compensation to ambassadors, influencers and content creators, leaving Cardano exposed to hostile public discourse. “Cardano is considered a lame chain,” he says. “Ghost chain. Nobody is using Cardano. Cardano is a dead project (…) Why do you hear it? You hear it because there is no one on the other side of the argument.”
He directly linked brand issues to user growth, arguing that better wallets, simpler onboarding, stronger aggregator channels, and more planned marketing are prerequisites for turning infrastructure into real network activity. He also said that Cardano should focus its strategic identity on areas where it can differentiate itself, particularly Bitcoin DeFi and privacy, rather than trying to beat larger rivals on cost, liquidity, or raw user numbers.
The broader message was that the governance system is currently facing a practical test. Hoskinson said the ecosystem needs to stop treating every Treasury request as a piecemeal bidding war and start acting with coordinated intent. “This is not an infrastructure game anymore,” he said near the end of the broadcast. “This is a game of practicality and experience.”
At the time of writing, ADA was trading at $0.2590.
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