The steward of the Cardano blockchain is seeding DeFi liquidity, backing an $80M venture fund and signing enterprise deals — a reversal of its hands-off posture that lands as onchain metrics fall and the network’s founder feuds with it over governance.
The Cardano Foundation is stepping out from behind the blockchain’s technical curtain to actively push adoption and seed its decentralized finance markets, a reversal of the supporting role it held for most of the network’s history, Chief Executive Officer Frederik Gregaard said.
“We believe that before we were about enabling adoption and now we’re getting much more focused on actually getting real transactions building onchain,” Gregaard said in a June 5 interview with The Defiant. “In the last six months we started to do some active market making and helped on some AMMs.”
The Cardano Foundation is providing an eight-figure ADA amount in liquidity to key Cardano stablecoin projects through multiple channels, he said. In April, the Foundation deployed ADA liquidity into Cardano-based market maker Flowdesk “to improve market depth, enhancing stablecoin liquidity for USDA and USDM,” Gregaard said.
The Foundation is also serving as constitutional administrator of the Orion Fund, an $80 million venture vehicle run with venture capital fund Draper Dragon whose first treasury tranche the community ratified in April. It also signed a three-year technology agreement with the Brazilian Olympic Committee this month.
The Foundation’s move lands in the middle of an unsettled debate over how involved a blockchain’s steward should be.
In a March mandate, the Ethereum Foundation recast itself as a steward of the network’s more cypherpunk values, as it purposely takes a step back from functions such as marketing, business development and a focus on the ETH price. Other foundations run the opposite way. The Solana Foundation, the Zug-based nonprofit behind one of the highest-activity Layer 1 blockchains, staffs marketing, business-development and institutional-partnership teams that actively court builders and capital. The Cardano Foundation is now publicly picking the more active model.
Ecosystem Turmoil
The repositioning comes as Cardano’s onchain activity contracts, some ecosystem projects have shut down, while token-holder governance has denied key proposals and co-founder Charles Hoskinson partially steps back.
Treasury withdrawals need at least two-thirds of participating delegated-representative stake to pass, and DReps have used that bar to reject or stall some of the largest requests tied to the Foundation, Input Output Global (IOG) and EMURGO. They voted down the 7.8 million ADA Cardano Summit budget in late May, killing the Foundation’s flagship event. They also turned on a request for 32.9 million ADA for IOG’s research budget. The same voters have backed spending they judged better targeted, ratifying the Orion Fund’s first tranche and a developer-tooling budget. Opposition has clustered around demands for tighter, auditable milestones.
Gregaard said the vote rejections are a signal of the governance system working and demanding accountability.
“I actually don’t think it was a problem that the Cardano summit didn’t get voted through. I could potentially, if I wanted, have centralized our voting power and pushed it through, but what we’re really looking at is how do we operate in a world where there are multi-stakeholders and how do we create that accountability?” he said.
Some of the ecosystem’s best-known applications, the analytics platform TapTools and the NFT marketplace JPG.Store, shut down within weeks of each other.
“Extremely many blockchains are artificially keeping some projects or some transactions alive,” Gregaard said. “From my point of view, I think it’s very healthy that there is some change, and I’m mainly looking at the diversity and impact of these projects.”
Onchain Metrics
ADA, the 19th-largest cryptocurrency at about $6.2 billion in market cap, traded near $0.17, down roughly 76% in the last year, versus a decline of about 40% in Bitcoin and Ether, according to CoinGecko.
Gregaard said that “the price doesn’t really reflect what’s happening onchain.”
Total value locked on Cardano stood at about $94 million, down from roughly $141 million a month earlier, ranking the chain 29th among blockchains, according to DeFiLlama.
Gregaard disputed DeFiLlama’s figure. He argued that DefiLlama undercounts Cardano TVL by “billions” because the metric does not capture staked ADA, and that the network runs on native assets rather than locking value inside smart contracts.
The slide extends to other activity measures, even in ADA-denominated terms Gregaard said provide a fairer read. Cardano’s monthly chain fees peaked above 1.2 million ADA in 2022, and monthly DEX volume topped 800 million ADA in 2023. Both have trended lower since, with recent months running well below those highs, according to DefiLlama data.
Pressed on the weakening DEX volume and transaction counts, Gregaard said the Foundation would now give more attention to onchain activity it had previously left to the ecosystem: “I do think that we need to take a bit more care of the TVL on Cardano, where before I was more focused on actual enterprise usage and replacing some existing systems.”
Stand on Adoption
Gregaard framed the change as a maturing of the Foundation’s mandate. “The Cardano Foundation’s role was never about adoption; that was mainly Charles’s company, IOHK, and Emurgo in Asia,” he said. “But we’re taking a larger stand on adoption.”
In a written response to follow-up questions, Gregaard said the direction flows from the Cardano 2030 vision, a strategy framework developed by the Intersect member organization with input from more than 700 participants.
An onchain “info action” asking delegated representatives to endorse the framework passed with 67.8% support in January, representing 3.77 billion ADA. The vote was a non-binding signal rather than a mandated roadmap, Intersect said at the time.
The Foundation has been moving in that direction for months. Its budget review process, published in April, scores proposals against five pillars derived from the 2030 strategy. The Foundation also took over stewardship of Project Catalyst, Cardano’s onchain funding program, from Input Output Global. And it registered as a delegated representative, building a stake of 360 million ADA in delegated voting power.
A Treasury-Funded Venture Bet
The Orion Fund is the largest single expression of the pivot. The vehicle, managed by Draper Dragon and accelerated through Draper University, targets real-world asset and institutional DeFi startups building on Cardano. The Foundation said it holds no role in managing the fund or its investments, instead supporting the administrative framework, including an ownerless special-purpose vehicle called Arouet Holdings designed to route returns back to the treasury.
Funding runs through the treasury, not the Foundation. The first tranche, a withdrawal of 50 million ADA, was ratified onchain when voting closed on April 14 with about 73% of participating delegated-representative stake in favor, clearing the two-thirds supermajority that treasury actions require. The full $80 million target depends on later tranches that each need separate governance approval, capped at 175 million ADA in total.
Reaching Beyond DeFi
The Foundation is also pushing use cases outside trading. In addition to the Brazilian Olympic Committee already mentioned, the Foundation highlighted its Project Swaminathan in India, an agricultural initiative run with Syngenta Foundation India, which has registered roughly 15,000 farms onchain, anchoring satellite-verified land and crop data to Cardano.
An onchain funding proposal for the project cited about 10,500 farm registrations as of May 5, at roughly 500 per day across districts in Maharashtra. Gregaard cited the farm work, along with enterprise relationships he said include Petrobras and European financial infrastructure firms, as evidence of adoption that does not depend on token speculation. Those enterprise figures are the Foundation’s own and could not be independently verified.
On interoperability, Hoskinson announced a LayerZero integration at the Consensus Hong Kong conference in February, and the connection went live in March through the Cardano Pentad, the group of core entities that includes the Foundation, Input Output Global, EMURGO, Intersect and the Midnight Foundation. The integration links Cardano to more than 160 blockchains. Gregaard described it in the interview as a recently announced bridge to larger ecosystems such as Ethereum.
A Quieter Role for Charles
Against community speculation that Hoskinson is leaving, Gregaard described the founder as one contributor among many.
Hoskinson posted “I’m taking a break” on June 3, walked it back a day later, and used a video address to criticize the Foundation’s governance and warn of a “wave of failures” among Cardano projects.
“He basically transferred from being a founder and CTO of the whole project to being a contributor on equal footing with many others,” Gregaard said, adding that Hoskinson is “building new technology” and remains a “large thought leader.”
Cardano’s Leios scaling testnet is due to launch on June 23, a technical milestone the network has tied to higher throughput.
Further Orion tranches will return to onchain votes, testing whether DReps will keep funding the venture bet. Gregaard said he plans to present the Foundation’s enterprise work, including its blockchain-based financial audit, at the Point Zero Forum in Zurich.
