Where Does the Cardano Treasury Money Come From, and Who Spends It?

Think of a building where every flat puts a little money into a shared box each month. Nobody owns the box. When the roof needs repair, the neighbours meet, someone shows a plan and a price, and they vote. If enough people say yes, the money leaves the box. If not, it stays.

Cardano has a box like that. It is called the treasury, and in early November 2026 it held about 1.4 billion ADA. That is a lot of money with no company sitting on top of it, so it is fair to ask how it fills up and who is allowed to open it.

What is the Cardano treasury?

The treasury is a fund that lives inside the Cardano protocol itself. It is not a bank account, and it is not a wallet that someone holds the keys to. It is a number in the ledger, the shared record that every Cardano node keeps.

Its purpose is to pay for work that helps the whole network: software development, security audits, tools, education, and community projects. For years, most of the core work was paid by the companies that built Cardano. The treasury lets the network pay its own bills.

Where does the money come from?

The treasury gets new ADA every five days, at the end of each epoch (I explained the five-day rhythm in What Is an Epoch on Cardano?). Two sources go into one pot:

1. New ADA from the reserve. Of the 45 billion ADA that can ever exist, part was not handed out at the start. This part is called the reserve. Every epoch, 0.3% of what is left in the reserve is released.
2. Transaction fees. All the fees people paid during the epoch are added.

From this pot, 20% goes straight into the treasury. The rest becomes staking rewards for pools and the people who delegate to them. So when you pay a fee, a small part of it ends up in the treasury. I wrote about that in How Cardano Transaction Fees Work.

There is also a third, smaller source. Projects that got money and did not use all of it can send it back with a special transaction called a treasury donation. According to cardano.org’s treasury page, about 22 million ADA came back this way so far.

How much goes in, really?

Here are real numbers from the ledger, taken from the public Koios data service. At the end of epoch 665 the treasury held about 1,392.9 million ADA. One epoch later it held about 1,396.5 million ADA. That is roughly 3.6 million ADA added in five days.

That flow is slowly getting smaller. The reserve shrinks every epoch, and 0.3% of a smaller number is a smaller number. It still holds about 6 billion ADA, so this will not stop soon, but in the long run the treasury will depend more on fees. That means it depends on people actually using Cardano.

Who can spend it?

Since the Plomin upgrade in January 2025, ADA can leave the treasury in only one way: a treasury withdrawal, which is a type of governance action. A governance action is a formal proposal written on the blockchain.

The steps look like this:

1. Someone makes a proposal. Any ADA holder can do it. They must lock a deposit of 100,000 ADA, which they get back when voting ends, pass or fail. The proposal links to a public document that explains the plan and the budget.
2. DReps vote. DReps are delegated representatives: people who vote with the ADA that holders give them. A withdrawal needs yes votes from 67% of the active DRep stake.
3. The Constitutional Committee checks it. This small elected group asks one question: does this follow the Cardano constitution? Two thirds of its members must agree.
4. Time runs out or it passes. A proposal has six epochs, about 30 days, to reach the numbers. If it does, the ADA is paid out. If not, it expires.

Stake pool operators like me do not vote on treasury withdrawals. We vote on hard forks and some network settings, but spending is for DReps and the committee.

A real example from cardano.org: in August 2026, a withdrawal of 120 million ADA passed with 80.1% of DRep stake and six of seven committee votes.

Are there limits?

Yes, and I am glad they exist.

• The net change limit. The community agrees on a maximum amount that may leave the treasury in a period. Every withdrawal must fit inside it.
• The constitution. It has its own rules for treasury money, and the committee checks every withdrawal against them.
• A guardrails script. This is a small program that the ledger runs on every withdrawal when it is submitted. If the proposal breaks a hard limit, the ledger rejects it before anyone can vote.
• The document hash. A hash is a short digital fingerprint of a file. Each proposal stores the fingerprint of its document on the blockchain. If someone changes the text later, everyone can see that it no longer matches.

What the treasury cannot do

The rules make sure the vote was counted correctly. They cannot make sure the money was spent well. A project can get funded, then deliver less than it promised, and the blockchain will not stop that. Checking results is human work: reading reports, asking questions, and voting no next time.

Another weak spot is attention. A withdrawal needs 67% of active DRep stake, and an active DRep who does not vote counts as a no. That protects the treasury. But if most ADA holders never delegate their voting power, a small group decides for everyone. I explained how DReps work in What Is a DRep?.

And the treasury is in ADA. If the price of ADA falls by half, a budget agreed in ADA buys half as much work. Projects feel this, and voters should remember it.

Why I care about this

As a DRep, I read treasury proposals, and some are long. The good ones say what will be built, who builds it, what it costs, and how we will know it is done. The weak ones are mostly hope. I vote yes on the first kind and give a short public reason either way.

I think a network that pays for its own development, with open votes and open books, is one of the most interesting things Cardano has tried. It is slow. People argue. Sometimes they argue for weeks. That is still better than one company deciding behind a closed door.