We just submitted our budget proposal: "The Marketing-Powered Demand Engine for Cardano." Here's what it is, what it costs, and why it matters. THE PROBLEM Cardano stands on strong technical foundations. Yet for enterprise decision-makers, it's not an obvious "yes" — not because the technology can't deliver, but because they're missing use-case clarity, proof, and engagement paths. The business world sees Cardano as a respected ecosystem. Not yet as first choice for enterprise infrastructure. THE SOLUTION A complete enterprise demand generation system that repositions Cardano as "The Blockchain for Serious Business." The system operates through a three-stage funnel: Attention →Proof → Qualified Leads. Two recommended blueprint verticals: Institutional DeFi and Supply Chain Traceability — final selection to be validated with the GMC. Three pilot markets: UK, Germany, Switzerland. A central Cardano Hub serves as the evidence and engagement environment. Directly aligned with the Cardano 2030 Strategy Framework — Pillar 2 (Adoption & Utility) and Pillar 4 (Community & Ecosystem Growth), supporting core KPIs: TVL, monthly transactions, and monthly active users. THE INVESTMENT 12-month pilot. Four milestone-gated work packages — each one only unlocked when the previous one delivers. WP4 (V2 Supply Chain) is only released after the Q3 KPI checkpoint passes. Total investment: €2,978,738 (53% media, 47% agency — within industry benchmark). ADA surplus gets returned to the Treasury. WHO WE ARE Serviceplan Group — the only globally ranked agency that has built live Cardano infrastructure, deployed it in production, and holds a formal Cardano Foundation partnership. Official Intersect member. Masumi Network has been on mainnet since November 2024 with 25,000 on-chain transactions. Independent Network of the Year at Cannes Lions 2025 (19 Lions). #1 globally on WARC Creative 100 and Media 100. 6,500 people, 40 countries, €866M revenue. Full proposal and brochure in the reply below.👇

A follow-up on the conversion buffer, since it was one of the main concerns raised here and on Hydra. Fist off: Nobody's enjoying where the ADA price is right now, ourselves included. Back on May 29 we committed to moving from a 30% buffer to 20%, anchored to a more recent spot. That still stands. The original worry was that a buffered $0.17 baked in too much contingency, with no room under the NCL. Fair concern at the time, when ADA was at $0.21. It's now at $0.16. We mention this not to claim we called it, nobody wants to be right about a falling price. However, it shows what the buffer was actually for: protecting a 12-month campaign from being underfunded mid-flight, not padding the ask. The price right now isn't a verdict on Cardano. The whole market is down roughly $250B in two weeks. Enterprise infrastructure adopts on a 13-to-16 year curve, and Cardano is nine years in. The work that matters happens regardless of where the chart is on any given week. That's exactly why we think the timing argument cuts the other way: you build the demand engine before the cycle turns, not after. -Yves

Adoption. Adoption. Adoption. We all know Cardano needs more adoption — but what does our plan actually look like? - Building safer, faster, better technology? Essential. - Making life easier for developers? Absolutely. - DeFi, interoperability? No argument there. But technology alone is not a plan. Who are we building for? What unites us while preserving decentralization? How are we adapting to market shifts and emerging opportunities? As @phillip_pon recently put it: "Institutional/enterprise is the future of web3. Retail, historically the leader, is now a follower. Institutional adoption is everyone — the large banks, asset managers, insurers. If we don't have native integrations, they simply will not build on Cardano." I fully agree. Through institutional adoption, we can bring the real benefits of blockchain and decentralisation to the masses. Stablecoins and cross-border payments are the obvious starting point. The next wave will likely come through seamless UX/UI — onboarding people who don't even realise they're using blockchain. My conviction: within 5–10 years, blockchain will be invisible infrastructure that delivers value to every person on the planet, whether they know it or not. Think about the internet. We needed the infrastructure first — connectivity, speed, better hardware. That was the baseline. But then came the applications, and with them, an entirely different mindset: user-first, enterprise-focused, industry-disrupting. Blockchain is at that same inflection point. The Product Committee did a great work in 2025 establishing a vision, mission, and north star KPIs — a strong foundation for direction. Through collaboration with the GMC and Product Committees, we identified two areas where the ecosystem can meaningfully improve: 1. A Vertical Strategy Rather than spreading efforts thin, we need focused investment in areas where Cardano has a genuine strategic advantage — Bitcoin DeFi and government solutions are prime examples. Each vertical should have: - A disruptive solution addressing a massive, real-world problem - Dedicated tech infrastructure and tooling (across multiple Cardano teams) - A clear go-to-market strategy - World-class partners ready to scale - KPIs aligned with the Cardano 2030 roadmap - Multiple dApps delivering solutions across vertical use cases *Both the Orion Fund and Service Plan have independently identified vertical focus as critical to their success. 2. Lead Generation & Enterprise Onboarding A coordinated lead generation layer would allow the ecosystem to: - Proactively reach the most relevant companies - Manage incoming leads more efficiently - Connect prospects with the right Cardano builders - Support enterprises through onboarding (where BD teams invest the most time) - Deploy a dedicated business task force — Pentad-style — to close deals This treasury cycle will likely fund mostly technical proposals. They are all important — but technology alone will not drive adoption. DReps are working incredibly hard under real pressure, and a budget framework (allocating across tech, business, and admin) would have helped guide decisions. We don't have that this time. So to the ecosystem and to our DReps: please give serious attention to business and adoption-focused proposals. Engage with them, ask questions, push back where needed. Non-technical proposals may seem easier to critique (especially for non developers) — but remember, supporting adoption is not a soft goal. It is a strategic necessity. Funding technology alone increases risk; it doesn't reduce it. I am deeply optimistic that Cardano will become a leader in meaningful, large-scale adoption. It depends on us — this extraordinary community, built on an incredible technical foundation. It is time to take it to the next level. Thank you. P.S. Sorry for the long post — I have plenty more to say about it 🙂

The Hydra discussion sharpened our thinking on one point: the ADA conversion rate. We looked at it again, the argument holds up, so we adjusted it. The original 30% buffer at submission put the assumed ADA rate at $0.17 per ADA. It's there to cover ADA price movement between submission and disbursement, so the campaign doesn't end up underfunded if ADA drops in the window. Several DReps (@nimuepool, @SIPO_Tokyo and others in posts) raised a concrete point: even though surplus ADA returns to Treasury, the requested amount still counts against NCL headroom, which puts pressure on what else can get funded in this cycle. So, we are prepared to commit to 20% instead of 30%. That meaningfully reduces the ADA we'd actually need locked, freeing NCL room for other proposals. We're also open to discussing a hard slippage cap. Both would get fixed in writing during the contracting phase. -Yves

Next one we feel worth surfacing from Hydra: what a „Yes“ vote actually funds. There's a common reading that a „Yes“ is a blank 20.87M ADA (€2.98M / $3.55M). That’s not correct. WP1 through WP3 (11.03M ADA / €1.62M / $1.87M) covers the strategic foundation plus the DeFi vertical. WP4 (9.23M ADA / €1.36M / $1.57M) only releases if the WP3 KPI checkpoint shows DeFi is generating enterprise demand at scale. If DeFi underperforms, WP4 stays in Treasury and is not disbursed. So the effective envelope on a „Yes“ vote is closer to 11M ADA (€1.62M) than 20M ADA (€2.98M), because 9.23M ADA is contingent on data. Surplus ADA also returns to Treasury. The phased approach a few of you suggested in the comments is already built in. Voting „Yes“ is voting for ca. 11M ADA unconditionally, plus ca. 9.2M ADA conditional on demonstrated DeFi performance. -Yves

Now that the vote is in full swing, we want to highlight some discussions that might get lost on Hydra. There's been a lot of discussion on the verticals proposed for Phase 1 (Institutional DeFi and Supply Chain Traceability). Worth being explicit: The framework we built is exchangeable. What we're really asking you to fund is the demand engine and the methodology, not a specific bet on Supply Chain. If the GMC and the relevant stakeholders feel a different V2 makes more sense, say RWA, that's a conversation we're absolutely open to. DeFi as V1 has the clearest enterprise evidence right now, but even there, final selection gets validated at kickoff. -Yves

There are more marketing relatetd proposals on hydra now, which is great. For us, @yorambenzvi's BD network is very interesting as Enterprise demand always is a sequence. It consist roughly of three layers. The first creates demand: visibility for Cardano in the verticals that have been prioritized, so the Cardano shows up on the consideration list when someone is evaluating blockchain options. The second is the BD layer Yoram describes, where qualified leads get routed and the buyer is being walked through the long enterprise cycle. The third is the builders, who integrate and deliver the actual solution. Our proposal sits in the first layer, including the routing infrastructure that hands qualified leads off into the Cardano ecosystem (Appendix p. 18). Yoram's sits in the second. Builders carry the third. The same applies more broadly. Foundation work, Summit activity, partner referrals all generate first-layer inbound, but inbound that lands without a second layer to convert it just stays inbound, and qualified deals without a third layer stall before integration. -Yves

Thank you @nmkr_io and @Padierfind for hosting the space on our proposal. We would like to pick up on some of the topics that came up in the talk, starting with the questions on the OOH placements. Why not go only digital as OOH is hard to measure and how do we prove real business impact? OOH is 13% of the media spend, deployed surgically at event venues like e.g. Money 20/20, Davos, Gartner summits for the DeFi vertical. This will also not be a city-wide buy hoping someone notices, but using very specific locations where we can catch the attendees attention. Why OOH at all? "Seriousness by size." When a CIO walks into a Gartner summit and sees Cardano on a high-quality format right outside the venue, that does something a LinkedIn ad cannot. It signals the brand is willing to spend at the level its claims demand. Add the dual-experience logic on p. 30 of the appendix: digital scales reach, in-real-life builds trust. OOH at events is the bridge. What we measure for the campaign overall is in Section 8: hub traffic, qualified leads routed into the ecosystem, brand sentiment shifts, and the Strategy Framework's core KPIs. For the OOH portion specifically, we don't promise click-level attribution. What we do measure are proxy effects: hub traffic spikes from event-market geo-fences, lead pickup post-event, sentiment shifts in pilot markets. For broader B2B context, Binet and Field's research at LinkedIn's B2B Institute is the reference: roughly a 50/50 split between brand-building and activation drives long-term growth. Brand impact is never 100% attributable. - Yves

The entire design philosophy of Cardano and our execution layer of prioritizing security above all else and making the sacrifices to do so, has struggled in the market for the past five years because the blue chip DeFi protocols on other chains were largely considered untouchable, secure, and reliable with years of proven history. So we had to argue abstractly that dApps here are more secure, which doesn’t land well when someone can point to AAVE and see that in its many years of operations, has never been subject to an exploit, or to Uniswap where the same is true. With the advent of advanced AI all of that has changed, the cracks are finally showing, bluechip DeFi apps with impeccable historic records are being exploited left and right for millions and millions month after month. Trust is shaking, LPs are leaving left and right. It is critical that we take advantage of this narrative and we market this now. We need to strike while the iron is hot, and recent events form a perfect storm for heavily marketing Cardano DeFi and attracting external LPs.

Joining @nmkr_io and @Padierfind tomorrow for a Space on our budget proposal. We'll walk through the strategy, the work packages and why we feel this marketing push is due for Cardano. Looking forward to the discussion - Yves

Hey @Cardano! We know you have questions so join us tomorrow to discuss the Marketing Proposal for Cardano. Thursday, April 30th, 6pm CET. Link below

There is a lively discussion and lots of feedback on the choice of verticals in the proposal, so we want to address this properly. We have not randomly chosen Institutional DeFi and Supply Chain Traceability as the two verticals for Phase 1. We selected those as they are two of the four high-value verticals defined in the Cardano 2030 Strategy Framework: DeFi, RWA, Supply Chain and Payments. To state this bright and early: these are illustrative, not mandatory. To quote directly from p. 46 of the proposal: "The Phase 1 verticals and targeted high-profile industry events outlined in this proposal are deliberately illustrative, not prescriptive. Both the choice of verticals and the selection of relevant events can be adapted in alignment with community priorities and in close coordination with Cardano's existing marketing and ecosystem initiatives. This flexibility ensures the system remains responsive, inclusive, and driven by collective strategic intent rather than fixed assumptions." It was written into the proposal from the beginning because the system is vertical-agnostic by design. Same logic for any vertical: Problem, Capability, Proof, Next Step. We also already recommend AI Business and RWA as Verticals 3 and 4 for Year 2 (s. p. 25), with Masumi Network as the centerpiece for the AI narrative and Midnight's privacy layer as a key differentiator for RWA. Again, it is not us who set the direction, that is the community's job through its governance. We build and operate the system, the community decides what it is pointed at. Hope that helps to clarify this point in regards to what we are actually proposing. The full proposal can be found here: drive.google.com/drive/folde… -Yves

I am a massive fan of Cardano for a long time now. The technology and engineering pulled me in - now we are building with Masumi on Cardano for almost 1,5 years ourselves. And we constantly deliver what we promise and build AI products used by hundreds of real-world companies already. I talked over the years to many of our clients about „Why Cardano“ and explained why this blockchain is the only serious option for enterprise use-cases. When I explain Cardano in my own words, people get excited, ask good questions, see the benefits and are genuinely surprised that they either have never heard of Cardano or had a completely different and mostly false idea of it. And that needs to change. And you can change this through good communication and by breaking out of the crypto bubble on X. You need to get Cardano positioned in front of business leaders and shape a perception and narrative about Cardano which not just resonates with them, but enforces our strengths as an ecosystem. The timing is perfect for this. Never has there been more anxiety across business leaders about digital sovereignty, security, traceability of all things digital & AI. They are all ears to understand what blockchain has to offer. I would like to encourage you to read the linked PDF below: it shows you our thinking - which is btw already the result of engaging with not just all three founding entities, but also with the GMC, the community and many well known individuals from the community. I think you can tell we not just did our homework, but we have already put in an considerable upfront investment. We have skin in the game on many different levels. Not just by the pure time invested into this proposal, but even more so by being committed to build on Cardano, to recommend Cardano and bring our clients with us. We are absolute amazed by the attention this proposal has been getting over the last 24 hours and I can tell you we read and consider every feedback and comment. So thanks for reviewing our proposal 🙏 I know it’s a lot to go through. But also absolutely worth it to take a deeper look. drive.google.com/file/d/1Mrq…

Really proud of what Serviceplan is putting forward in this proposal! I hope it will find the support of many. I strongly believe that communication is key for Cardano and that Cardano has so many strong foundations, that its the only blockchain who can claim to be "the blockchain for serious business" That's the reason why we decided to invest in Cardano. And that is why many other companies should invest in Cardano too. Let's spread the word! For this porposal. And for Cardano.

As there is a lot to digest, we created a short film to give you a brief overview of what we would like to achieve with the proposal. If you want to dig deeper, please have a look at the full proposal here: drive.google.com/file/d/1Mrq… and if you want to dig even deeper, the appendix is here: drive.google.com/file/d/1qHy…