The Cardano Foundation has released a six-point roadmap that reorients resources toward decentralized finance, Web3 integrations, real-world assets, marketing, and deeper governance decentralization, framing the plan as the “next phase” of its adoption strategy. Dated September 23, 2025 and signed by CEO Frederik Gregaard, the plan concentrates on liquidity, standards, and organizational focus areas that the Foundation says will shape efforts “in the near to mid future.”
It expects the impact to become visible “over the next six to twelve months.” The organization also signals support for community-led proposals that aim to bolster DeFi liquidity and adoption, citing the “Stablecoin DeFi Liquidity Budget” initiative as an example it will continue to collaborate on.
A second track targets Web3 adoption. Acknowledging that Cardano’s “technical uniqueness” can create integration complexity versus EVM-based stacks, the Foundation says it is expanding its Web3 team by two roles focused on “integrations, listings, real-world assets (RWA), and more.”
On real-world assets, the Foundation says Cardano’s native-asset model, deterministic fees, and sustainability profile make it well-suited to the segment, noting it “announced the launch of $10M in RWA on Cardano” via a collaboration with MembersCap. It ties near-term progress to standards work, prioritizing completion and promotion of CIP-0113 and CIP-0143 to bring “interoperable, programmable tokens to Cardano,” and flags work with Masumi to adopt the x402 payments framework for agent-to-agent payments.
Marketing and demand generation are set to expand. Pointing to shifting regulatory and industry conditions over the last year, the Foundation says it will increase its 2026 demand-generation budget by 12% across inbound, content, paid, media, and events. Plans include Cardano booths at TOKEN2049 and Consensus, collaboration on Africa Tech Summit 2026 and a Digital Asset 2026 event in London, and a coordinated developer-onboarding pipeline with post-hackathon support.
Governance decentralization is the sixth prong. Building on a previous “delegation of 140M ada to seven Builder DReps,” the Foundation will “delegate a further 220M ada to eleven selected DReps” across new Adoption and Operations categories, while reducing its own DRep self-delegation to 80M ADA. Methodology details are to come, but the thrust is to widen the set of informed governance actors.
At press time, ADA traded at $0.81.
