Cardano founder warns research team may leave if $8M funding plan fails

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson warns that the network could lose key scientists after some governance representatives voted against a research proposal seeking 32.9 million ADA, worth about $8 million, from the network's treasury to fund it.

Input Output, the engineering firm behind Cardano and the firm Hoskinson helped build, is asking the Cardano treasury to fund its 2026 research program. The proposal, called Cardano Vision 2026, was submitted on May 7 and is still in the voting stage, with expiration listed for June 8.

• For a Cardano treasury proposal to pass, it needs support from two groups. The Constitutional Committee has to approve it, and delegated representatives, the people ADA holders choose to vote for them.

But the Cardano Vision 2026 proposal bundles several differnt long-term research areas into one package, including scalability, post-quantum security, identity, zero-knowledge tools and governance.

CardanoCube, a Cardano governance tracker, shows the proposal has:

• about 18.2% of relevant delegated voting power in favor;
• 4.8% explicitly against;
• 3.5% tied to no-confidence status;
• and 73.5% still not voted.

For a Cardano treasury proposal to pass, it needs 67% support from delegated representatives, according to the network's documentation. The problem is that only about 18% of the relevant voting power has supported it so far, while most voting power hasn't even voted yet.

"Our lab will be forced to close"

Hoskinson escalated the dispute in a Japanese-language X post, saying he was "deeply saddened" that some Japanese delegated representatives voted against the research proposal, though it remains unclear which representatives he meant or why he singled out Japan.

"If this proposal does not pass, we want the entire Japanese community to fully recognize that Cardano will lose its scientists, and our lab will be forced to close," Hoskinson said in the post.

The replies quickly turned into a referendum on Hoskinson's tone. One user mocked the Cardano founder's Japanese-language post, asking whether he wrote it in Japanese "for extra effect on bullying the Japanese community."

Another pushed the governance argument further, saying that if Cardano can't survive without "unconditional access to the treasury," then maybe governance shouldn't have been handed to voters in the first place.

Others argued that treasury funding should move toward bounty-style competition instead of guaranteed incumbents.