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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.
Hoskinson framed the ecosystem as three layers: infrastructure, utility and experience. Infrastructure covers the core rails: nodes, languages and scaling components such as Hydra while utility is the actual DApp and DeFi stack, and experience is the user-facing layer of wallets, onboarding, content and brand. His argument was that Cardano has historically lived too heavily in the first category.
“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.”
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His 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.”
Alongside utility, Hoskinson spent significant time on what he described as Cardano’s neglected experience layer. He said the ecosystem has failed to compensate ambassadors, influencers and content creators, leaving Cardano exposed to a hostile public narrative. “Cardano is considered to be the uncool chain,” he said. “Ghost chain. Nobody uses Cardano. Cardano is a dead project […] Why do you hear it? You hear it because there’s nobody on the other side of the argument.”
He tied that brand problem directly to user growth, arguing that better wallets, simpler onboarding, stronger aggregator channels and more deliberate marketing are prerequisites for turning infrastructure into actual network activity. He also said Cardano should focus its strategic identity on areas where he believes it can differentiate, particularly Bitcoin DeFi and privacy, rather than trying to beat larger rivals on cost, liquidity or raw user count.
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.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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