Cardano enters 2025 with quiet strength. After years of deliberate development, the ecosystem is beginning to reveal its potential. The foundations are in place: now comes the time to build on them. As new use cases emerge and key technologies go live, the question is no longer if Cardano will deliver, but how far it can go.
Where is Cardano headed?
1. My Reasons for Cardano: The Collapse of Money and Democracy
I come from a sacrificed generation.
I was born into a middle-class collapsing family, raised to believe in the promise that “hard work will pay off.”
But in 2012, someone decided otherwise.
Without a vote, without a mandate, a non-elected man in a suit, Mario Draghi, stood before the world and said he would do “whatever it takes” to destroy our currency.
This happened after the decision to “save the banks” in 2008 that nobody voted for. Trillions of dollars were created out of thin air to bail out the same institutions that had driven the global economy to the brink of collapse.
And then the 2020 pandemic, and with it, a new wave of emergency measures: more money printing, more debt, more centralized control.
I remember vividly when the interest on the U.S. national debt reached $1 trillion per year. That moment stuck with me, not just because of the scale, but because of what it meant: the US now pays $1 trillion annually just to service the interest, not the principal.
In 2020, I woke up.
That video was the first shock:
With Bitcoin you fix money.
But how do you fix democracy?
Answer with the second video that I discovered soon after:
That’s when I’ve decided to put all my money into Bitcoin and Cardano.
What I called the UTXO portfolio.
2. Cardano: The Trillion Dollars Bet
So why Cardano as a long term investment?
First, it’s solving a trillion dollars problem: the problem of corrupted and inefficient administrations.
1 trillion dollars is the interests on the debt which is the direct cost of the problem above.
The whole governance framework is global and decentralized to propose an alternative to the world.
Then, it will become the railway for Bitcoin DeFi.
Bitcoin is locked, with a proof, that can be read by #Cardano and mint a mirror token usable on the DeFi ecosystem.
And this is a trillion dollar market.
Why?
In 2034, the DeFi market is $1.5T USD and probably 65% of that is dominated by Bitcoin DeFi.
That’s ~$1T USD.
Some cool kids are taking care of this on Cardano:
-Bodega
-Strike Finance
-Fluid Tokens
And many, many more.
But I’m not done… Another trillion dollars could come from the Real World Assets market:
At the moment, one project is doing the job, it’s called Palm and it’s KILLING it:
Finally, midnight is coming.
What is it? It’s a protocol to shield your data:
In a world where surveillance is the default, Midnight flips the script.
Built as a sidechain of Cardano, Midnight brings zero-knowledge privacy to smart contracts and data sharing. I let you guess how much this could be valued and how many companies it could destroy. And it’s coming next month.
But Cardano is also a treasury. Let’s talk about it, shall we?
3. Treasury Management: The Scandinavian Approach
Cardano’s treasury is one of its most valuable long-term assets: a war chest designed to fund innovation, security, and community growth. But how do we manage it responsibly? For inspiration, we can look to Scandinavia, where cautious, long-term fiscal planning has proven resilient, especially in the face of global economic shifts.
The Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund: A Benchmark of Prudence
Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global — the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world — is a textbook example of disciplined treasury management. Built on oil revenues, it now exceeds $1.5 trillion in assets. Yet, its annual spending is intentionally restrained.
- Annual spending rule: Norway follows a 3% fiscal rule, meaning the government can spend only up to 3% of the fund’s value per year — the estimated long-term real return.
- This ensures the fund remains sustainable across generations, avoiding over-extraction in prosperous years or depletion in downturns.
What About Cardano?
Compare this to the Cardano treasury under New Constitutional Layer (NCL) governance. At the time of writing:
- Cardano’s treasury has grown consistently, exceeding 1.5 billion ADA.
- Proposals in the first few NCL rounds suggest a spending rate of 2–5% per year, depending on voting turnout and community sentiment.
This is in line with the Norwegian model in terms of scale — but philosophically, there’s a deeper alignment:
Why a Scandinavian Mindset Matters
- Stability over hype: Scandinavians are known for conservative, measured progress. Spending big to “buy growth” isn’t their way — nor should it be ours.
- Intergenerational thinking: The Cardano treasury isn’t just for 2025 or Voltaire: it’s a multi-decade fund that should serve future generations of builders and voters.
- Anti-fragility: A well-funded treasury provides resilience during crypto downturns. Like Norway during oil price crashes, Cardano can keep investing when others are cutting.
Investing the Treasury Pot?
It’s also possible to use the treasury to buy assets or inject liquidity into the Cardano ecosystem.
That’s what the boss wants, a trade-off between yield and growth:
The idea behind asset-backed treasury would be to transform a sell pressure into a buy pressure for ADA.
Imagine an elected Cardano fund handling 50 millions USD of ADA diversifying into Bitcoin DeFi, AI stocks and real estate with yearly profits and yield reinvested in ADA?
I like that.
4. What to spend the rest of the Cardano treasury on? The Pencil Incentive
What to spend the rest of the Cardano treasury on, for internal projects?
In economics, Milton Friedman often referenced the parable of the pencil: a simple object that no single person knows how to make. Yet it comes into existence through a vast, decentralized network of individuals, each responding to market signals. The pencil is not created by central planning or a committee. It emerges because the market wants it.
That’s why Cardano’s treasury must be driven by incentives, not ideals. If we fund projects before they’ve proven any demand — or reward proposers just for trying — we risk misallocating resources and distorting the signal that tells us what the ecosystem actually needs.
Treasury funds should flow where traction already exists — to protocols with measurable usage, tooling that developers are already reaching for, and core infrastructure that lowers friction for future builders. These are the rails that enable markets to self-organize.
Funding should amplify momentum, not try to fabricate it. Because when incentives are wrong, even the smartest builders will end up chasing funding, not users.
You want concrete examples?
✅ Treasury Should Fund
| ✅ | Description |
|---|---|
| ✅ Core protocol development | Improvements to scalability, finality, fee markets, and Layer 1 upgrades. |
| ✅ Developer tooling with adoption | Libraries, SDKs, APIs that are already being used or solving real dev pain points. |
| ✅ Security infrastructure | Auditing tools, monitoring frameworks, and initiatives that protect the ecosystem. |
| ✅ Interoperability layers | Bridges, standards, or integrations that open Cardano to other ecosystems or allow easier onboarding. |
| ✅ Indexing, data layers, explorers | Especially when they’re used by dApps or developers today. |
| ✅ Maintenance of critical services | Including SPO tools, stake pool dashboards, relays, and node health monitoring that keep the network alive. |
❌ Treasury Should Not Fund
| ❌ | Description |
|---|---|
| ❌ Marketing for unproven projects | Ads, influencer content, or campaigns for dApps no one uses. |
| ❌ Vanity metrics or fake traction | Proposals that boast “X followers” or “10k impressions” with zero usage or on-chain activity. |
| ❌ Educational portals with no students | Courses or resource libraries no one reads, tracks, or follows up on. |
| ❌ Over-engineered tech with zero adoption | Protocols or tooling with empty GitHubs, no stars, no forks, no real users. |
| ❌ Repeat proposals that haven’t delivered | Asking for “Phase 2” or “Marketing budget” for projects with no visible outcome from Phase 1. |
| ❌ Speculative idea-stage dApps | Especially ones with no MVP, no traction, and no signal of real need. |
Now… Can we really talk about Cardano without talking about all the drama?
5. The Drama and The Reasons To Believe
So much happened that I had chatGPT to summarize the last couple of weeks without editing it:
“The Cardano community was recently shaken by a controversial proposal from Charles Hoskinson to allocate 100 million ADA from the treasury to support stablecoin liquidity. The idea split the ecosystem. Some saw it as a step forward for DeFi, but others feared it would trigger downward pressure on price. Influential voices like @cardano_whale warned of front-running risks and potential damage to ADA’s market stability.
A month before that, an old accusation resurfaced: a claim that IOG had used “genesis keys” during the 2021 Allegra hard fork to repurpose unclaimed ADA—reportedly worth hundreds of millions. Though IOG and Hoskinson firmly denied any wrongdoing, the timing intensified community distrust.
Separately, EMURGO faced scrutiny for using its “genesis ADA” to vote on governance matters. In response, it announced it would withdraw that stake and reassign voting power to smaller DReps, a move welcomed by many. Altogether, the tension revealed deep concerns around governance, transparency, and treasury management. The debate caused ADA’s price to drop and whale outflows to rise—but underneath, the real damage was to confidence.“
But I don’t care about all of that.
So why do I believe, more than ever?
Because beneath the noise, something rare and precious is unfolding. Disagreements aren’t signs of weakness: they’re proof that no single entity controls the network. Decisions are now out in the open, debated, and voted on by a global community. What seems like conflict on the surface is actually transparency in action.
And that’s the strongest reason to believe: power is shifting, permanently, into the hands of the many.
The winning protocol?
Built with love, craft and pain.
Without vulgar marketing, supporting something bigger than itself.
The cup of a carpenter.
I’m sure that you prefer the craft too.
Before concluding, I want a short paragraph to talk about why I want to stay away from “Cardano core”.
6. My Distance With the Core of the Cardano Ecosystem
In 2022, I launched a webpage to support and promote Cardano stake pool operators (SPOs). I offered an optional contribution model: those who contributed would appear higher on the page, and the funds would help pay for backlinks to improve the site’s Google ranking. I invested significant effort: writing pool descriptions, sourcing backlinks, reaching out to SPOs, and building the page.
I was publicly criticized by a prominent figure in the community, who insinuated that I was running a scam. I’ll never forget that moment. It was the day I realized there are two kinds of marketing in this space: the “approved by the party” and the “unapproved” kind, which is not under control of the Cardano elite.
In a word: I deeply want the Cardano network but not the USSR-style power vibes radiating from its core.
7. Conclusion
Cardano is a project full of contradictions.
The balance between growth and value for the treasury.
The balance between full decentralized everything and getting things done.
The balance between keeping the core principles pure and execute in a world that’s never immaculate.
Cardano is not perfect, and it may never be.
But it is the only serious attempt to build a constitutional layer for money.
And in my view, it’s worth trillions of dollars in the decade to come.
Embrace it or refuse it.
But if you refuse it, what is your alternative for the world?
