Cardano to Transfer $682 Million Treasury to Community

Upcoming upgrades will see Cardano's treasury transferred to the community. Cardano holds the 8th largest treasury in the crypto industry.

Cardano to Transfer $682 Million Treasury to Community

Cardano, a Proof of Stake (PoS) layer-1 blockchain launched in 2017, is approaching a significant milestone - the transfer of control over its $681.9 million treasury to the community.

Data from crypto asset tracking tool TapTools reveals that Cardano's treasury holds a substantial amount of ADA tokens valued at $681.9 million at the time of writing.

Unlike most blockchain protocols, Cardano's treasury consists solely of ADA tokens, rather than multiple stablecoins or other digital assets like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

This development is driven by the upcoming hard fork "Chang," scheduled for Q2/2024, aimed at fully decentralizing Cardano - where ADA token holders in the community will take over network governance.

In a now-deleted tweet, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson confirmed the deployment of "Voltaire" (or Chang hard fork) - the final development era aimed at achieving complete decentralization through on-chain governance.

"Voltaire" will focus on implementing two upgrades:

• Plutus V3: The programming language version for executing and developing Cardano's core smart contracts. This will introduce new cryptographic principles including Zero-Knowledge (ZK), enabling the construction of ZK-Rollups and ZK smart contracts.
• CIP-1694: Proposal granting ADA token holders voting rights on beneficial ecosystem development topics and features through Intersect, involving three distinct governance bodies within the new framework:
  • Constitution Committee (ICC)
  • Delegated Representatives (DReps)
  • Stake Pool Operators (SPOs) including other units participating in governance such as Input Output Global (IOG) - formerly IOHK, responsible for Cardano's research and development, and EMURGO, focusing on commercial projects.

Most DeFi experts view Cardano's increasing treasury reserves as reflective of network growth activities, accumulating funds from transaction fees and block rewards. Like most blockchain networks, Cardano utilizes its treasury to foster ecosystem development, with many praising this structure as a fundamental pillar for project sustainability.

Notably, Cardano remains committed to advancing to the final development era "Voltaire," despite loyal investor community criticism regarding ADA token prices.

At the time of writing, ADA tokens are trading around $0.42, representing a more than 50% increase over the past year (14/06/2023 - 14/06/2024), peaking at approximately 200% at $0.77. During the same period, another layer-1 blockchain, Solana (SOL), exhibited "outstanding" growth of 850%, peaking at over 1,200%.

1D chart of ADA/USDT pair on Binance at 10:05 PM on 14/06/2024