In late April 2026, Input Output Global published nine treasury proposals outlining a strategic roadmap extending through 2030, shifting funding authority from founders to the community. The total request stands at $38.9 million, representing a 50% reduction from the previous year's ask, justified by the organization's claim of achieving operational self-sufficiency as on-chain revenue matures. This governance shift places the burden of validation on the Delegated Representatives, who must approve or reject the submissions by the May 24, 2026 deadline, marking a pivotal test of the network's decentralized decision-making framework. The technical centerpiece of this initiative is Ouroboros Leios, a protocol upgrade designed to decouple transaction endorsement from block production to resolve current throughput constraints. By implementing a two-tier system where input blocks process transactions in parallel while ranking blocks handle ledger finalization, the architecture aims to drastically increase capacity. Preliminary simulations indicate a potential surge from the current 10 to 15 transactions per second to a range of 200 to 1,000 TPS under normal load, with theoretical peaks reaching 10,000 TPS in optimized configurations. To execute the Leios upgrade, IOG has allocated a specific request of 62.1 million ADA, valued at approximately $15.8 million at current market prices, covering node upgrades, monitoring infrastructure, and security audits. The timeline is aggressive, with a public testnet scheduled for June 2026 and a mainnet launch targeted before the year ends. This schedule follows the Van Rossum hard fork earlier in the month, which moved the network to Protocol Version 11 and optimized the Plutus smart contract engine, reducing script execution overhead by approximately 25% to provide a cleaner foundation for subsequent developments. Beyond raw throughput, the proposals include Babel Fees, a mechanism allowing users to pay transaction costs in non-ADA assets like stablecoins or native tokens, thereby removing a persistent friction point for new users. Concurrently, the UTXO HD engineering change aims to maintain node viability on standard residential hardware as the ledger expands, addressing the practical tension between decentralization and enterprise scale. Additionally, the Pogun proposal outlines an end-to-end Bitcoin DeFi engine designed to route Bitcoin liquidity into Cardano via trust-minimized bridges, with a mainnet credit market launch set for Q2 2026. According to Woofun AI monitoring, the convergence of these distinct technical vectors suggests a coordinated effort to capture cross-chain liquidity rather than isolated feature releases. Ecosystem expansion efforts are already underway, highlighted by the March 31 launch of the Midnight privacy sidechain, which operates as a confidentiality layer with its own NIGHT token and institutional validators including Google Cloud, MoneyGram, and Worldpay. Charles Hoskinson has positioned Midnight's tokenomics to return value to the broader ecosystem, drawing comparisons to Ripple's XRP model. Furthermore, EMURGO and Wirex launched a physical Visa debit card on April 22, enabling holders to spend ADA and over 680 other assets at standard merchants while earning 8% in crypto rewards, directly addressing the demand-side requirements for the projected transaction volume. On-chain data entering the voting period reveals significant accumulation trends, with wallets holding 10 million ADA or more reaching a four-month high of 424 wallets in early April. Despite this, the total value locked in Cardano's DeFi ecosystem remains around $132 million, significantly trailing competitors like Ethereum and Solana. Analysts note a market-cap-to-TVL ratio of roughly 66 times, suggesting that ADA holders have not yet rotated capital into on-chain activity in substantial numbers, leaving the interpretation of this metric as either latent potential or structural indifference open to debate. The long-term targets embedded in the roadmap are ambitious, projecting 324 million annual transactions and one million monthly active wallets by 2030, alongside a TVL increase from the current $132 million to a projected $3 billion. Price projections cited in IOG materials range from $1.20 to $5.00 by 2030, contrasting with the current trading range of $0.25 to $0.80. These figures carry inherent uncertainty, especially as competing networks like Ethereum's Layer 2 ecosystem and Solana continue to advance during the years Cardano has focused on research. The upcoming May 24, 2026 vote represents the first instance where IOG's development funding is subject to direct community approval rather than internal authorization. The subsequent June testnet for Leios will serve as the definitive empirical test of whether these technical ambitions can be executed on schedule. Success or failure in this window will determine the viability of the 2030 roadmap and the network's ability to transition from a research-heavy phase to a high-throughput, commercially viable blockchain infrastructure.