Intersect in 2026: renewed focus, stronger foundations

As Cardano's governance matures and the ecosystem enters a critical growth phase, Intersect is evolving how we support our members and the community. This post sets out our renewed strategic pillars, strengthening our technical coordination of the Haskell node, a change to how we deliver administration services, and the tools we are building to make that service more transparent and accessible.

Our 2026 budget request will be shared soon, and this context is intended to help the community understand our focus areas and priorities for the coming year and beyond.

Our role in Cardano

Intersect is a member-based organization for the Cardano ecosystem. We exist to provide technical support, structures, processes, and coordination that support Cardano’s resilience and help the community advance Cardano's growth and development. We do not direct the ecosystem. Our members deliberate, our working groups and committees recommend, and the community decides through on-chain governance. Our job is to make that process work well and remain accessible to everyone.

That role has not changed. What has changed is the ecosystem around us. Cardano's governance framework is now fully operational. Treasury withdrawals are being proposed, debated, and approved in real time. The 2025 budget cycle demonstrated that decentralized budgeting can work, while also revealing friction points and the resolve to protect Cardano’s permissionless system. The 2026 process is much improved and now open to anyone seeking treasury support across a range of initiatives, rolling up to support the Vision 2030 framework.

Approved earlier this year by a supermajority of DReps, the Vision 2030 framework is a step closer to a more shared understanding of what Cardano should be working toward. It is not exhaustive nor perfect, but represents a year-long effort with dozens of workshops and over 700 participants contributing to its current state. It will continue to be refined and iterated upon by the Product Committee at Intersect throughout 2026.

You can read the framework, and learn more about the live 2026 budget process on the IntersectMBO website.

And lastly, the critical integrations program is underway with USDCx and Dune Analytics now live on Cardano, and Pyth following shortly. Alternative node clients are emerging, and the community is rightly asking for clearer coordination across infrastructure, utility, and the experience layer that brings users to the network. We have taken stock of all of this and refined our focus accordingly.

Five pillars for 2026

We have updated our strategic pillars to better reflect what we currently do, while keeping the core mandate consistent. These pillars give us room to accommodate new scope and pursue initiatives as the ecosystem's needs evolve.

Member-led deliberation across infrastructure, utility, and experience
Through elected committees, working groups, and open participation, members shape recommendations on how Cardano's evolution and growth are prioritized and resourced across infrastructure, utility, and experience. Intersect provides the structure and framework that makes this deliberation possible, and puts into motion recommended initiatives, including those approved on-chain.

Core infrastructure stewardship
Support the stability and resilience of the Haskell node, release processes, and critical network components, including incident response. Help sustain the professional maintenance of Cardano's open-source codebases as public goods, so that foundational infrastructure remains secure, performant, and openly accessible.

Administration and initiative delivery
Help governance decisions translate into outcomes: contracts, milestones, transparency, and accountability. Where selected as the Administrator of approved initiatives, provide the operational scaffolding so that treasury-funded work can be tracked and delivered against community-defined priorities.

Ecosystem coordination and growth
Serve as a coordination point for ecosystem roadmap priorities and cross-stakeholder collaboration alongside founding entities and ecosystem partners. Strengthen pathways for member participation, regional representation, and contributor development. Support the ecosystem in building the distributed capacity needed to attract users, builders, and capital at scale.

Operational excellence
Continue to operate lean and increase our productivity. Prioritize automation, AI-augmented workflows, and data-driven decision making across internal operations and vendor oversight. Direct human effort toward member-facing coordination and delivery rather than administrative overhead.

A new administration model: always-on & on-demand

One of the most significant changes we have introduced in 2026 is how we fund and deliver our administration service. When it comes to being an administrator, Intersect remains one option among others and our definition of providing administration in accordance with Cardano’s constitution is one interpretation among many.

In 2025, Intersect included a flat-rate administration cost in our budget request. That model had limitations. It assumed a fixed scope of work over a fixed period, which meant the service was tied to a single annual budget cycle and limited our ability to support a broader range of proposals. Later in the year, we supported Snek and became the execution arm for the critical integrations workstream, but it remained challenging to budget and plan for. For vendors planning their own operations, this also created uncertainty: administration capacity was only guaranteed for as long as the budget lasted, and the bulk of approvals clustered around a narrow window of the year.

That does not serve the ecosystem well. Vendors need to plan. New initiatives emerge throughout the year. A healthy, agile ecosystem needs an administration service that is available when it is needed, not only when it was budgeted for. There’s also a growing need to support individuals and organizations to participate in Cardano’s governance, from navigating constitutional requirements to proposing solutions on-chain.

What’s new in 2026

From 2026, we are moving to a 3% administration fee applied to treasury withdrawals that Intersect administers. This means the administration function sustains itself proportionate to the volume of work the ecosystem asks of it. If demand grows, capacity grows with it. If demand is lower, cost to the ecosystem is lower too.

It aligns cost to value. There is no flat overhead to justify in advance and no surplus to account for if fewer initiatives come through. We believe this model is a better fit for a maturing, decentralized ecosystem. It keeps Intersect responsive without requiring the community to pre-fund an administration service whose scope is inherently unpredictable.

Separating out the cost of administration from Intersect’s other core services lets us deliver better value to the Cardano community. Intersect will continue stewarding governance processes, coordinating the Haskell node, fostering discussion among alternative node implementations, and maintaining a member-based organization in a reliable manner.

Introducing our new Administration Hub

Alongside the new model, we have now launched a new Administration Hub to bring greater clarity and documentation to how we work with vendors and the community.

The hub will serve as a single point of reference for how Intersect's administration service operates: what we do, how procurement works, how milestones are structured and tracked, what vendors can expect throughout the lifecycle of an administered initiative, and how the community can follow progress. This is about transparency and accessibility. If Intersect is asking the ecosystem to trust us with overseeing the operational delivery of treasury-funded work, the processes behind that delivery should be open and clearly documented.

Check it out on the IntersectMBO website

Core infrastructure: depth and distribution

Our work on core infrastructure stewardship continues to deepen. Coordinating the Haskell node, release processes, and incident response remains a central part of what we do. The chain partition event in late 2025 was a real-world test of this function, and the speed of the community's coordinated response demonstrated both the resilience of the community and the network, and the value of having structured coordination in place.

Looking ahead, 2026 and 2027 will see alternative node clients mature and enter production. This is a significant development for Cardano's long-term resilience and decentralization. Supporting client diversity, ensuring interoperability, and helping the ecosystem navigate a multi-client future is a natural extension of our infrastructure stewardship role. We are preparing for this work now.

What comes next

Our 2026 budget request will be shared in the coming days. It reflects the pillars and direction set out here. We have aimed to be transparent about what we do, a clearer and sharper focus, and clear about why.

Intersect exists to serve the Cardano ecosystem and support network resilience. Our members inform the direction. Our committees recommend priorities. The community governs. We provide scaffolding that helps all of this work. As the ecosystem grows and its needs evolve, so will we, always in service of the ecosystem and the long-term health of Cardano as a public good.