Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson has outlined an ambitious blueprint to turn the newly formed “Pentad” into a de facto executive engine for ecosystem growth in 2026, linking critical infrastructure deals, DeFi expansion, RealFi, Midnight’s privacy stack and a more aggressive developer and institutional outreach strategy.
Cardano Sets 2026 Ambitions With Pentad Governance
In a new livestream titled “Thoughts on Growth for Cardano in 2026 (Pentad Series),” Hoskinson framed Pentad as the missing executive layer in Cardano’s Voltaire-era governance design. CIP-1694 and the Cardano Constitution, he argued, have already established a “very strong legislative branch” and a “very strong judicial function,” with DReps providing checks and balances. What has been absent, he said, is an entity that can actually execute.
“We always had this idea that a government needs a judicial, a legislative, and an executive function,” he said. “But the executive function was always a little milky.”
The Pentad consists of the Cardano Foundation, Emurgo, Input Output, the Midnight Foundation and Intersect. Its first mandate is the “Cardano Critical Infrastructure” program, a coordinated negotiation effort to secure commercially essential integrations such as bridges, stablecoins, oracles and analytics. Hoskinson described this as a “try before you buy” test of whether the five entities can function as a single executive voice.
“All these guys together they’re super expensive and also they’re run by very competent business people,” he said of potential integration partners. “If we’re divided they’re going to divide and conquer and we’re going to end up with a damn mess and it’s going to be very expensive. So why don’t we put a Pentad together […] and let’s collectively negotiate kind of like collective bargaining.”
The success criteria are intentionally binary: either integrations are live, or they are not. Hoskinson called it “a really good test function for an emerging executive function.”
If that phase proves the concept, he wants the Pentad to pivot to explicit growth targeting in 2026. For now, he is anchoring that discussion in three headline indicators—monthly active users, transactions per day and TVL—while a broader KPI set is being drafted with community members. “Once we have a final set of candidate KPIs, we’re going to submit an info action to make them the official ecosystem KPIs,” he said, adding that “every budget moving forward has to be in some way connected to growth in those metrics.”
A central pillar of the 2026 plan is a curated showcase of roughly 10–15 Cardano DApps that exemplify the network’s capabilities. Hoskinson said these projects are typically “underfunded,” “understaffed,” and lack users, volume and TVL, which directly affects their profitability and Tier-1 exchange prospects. Midnight’s own listing push, he argued, has already “opened the door for Cardano native assets and all the big guys,” creating a window that showcase protocols could exploit if they reach sufficient scale.
The growth blueprint relies heavily on “aggregators of capital and people.” Hoskinson highlighted Bitcoin DeFi as a core channel to route external liquidity and users into Cardano, and pointed to XRP and other UTXO-based assets without native smart contracts as further sources of yield-seeking capital. Hybrid DApps that combine Cardano with Midnight’s privacy features are meant to provide differentiated USPs relative to Ethereum-based DeFi.
What Cardano Will Focus On
Developer and community strategy is set to become more aggressive. Hoskinson wants bi-weekly hackathons for Cardano, citing “awesome” growth results from Midnight’s cadence and existing events such as a large hackathon in Berlin. He argued that such frequency showcases that “Cardano can roll with the best of them” while tightening the feedback loop on Plutus and Aiken DevX.
At the same time, he called X “the worst of all mediums for a community to aggregate,” citing bots, noise and lack of curation, and pushed for controlled aggregation channels such as Discord, both for Cardano and for Midnight. Parallel to that, he described building a dedicated comms channel for analytics firms, institutions and VCs to run seminars on Midnight and Cardano, responding to persistent perceptions of Cardano as a “ghost chain” driven by incomplete third-party data.
On Input Output’s side, Hoskinson said the company is preparing a Cardano business unit to interface directly with the Pentad, consolidating ecosystem, engineering and governance work under leadership “custom-trained and tuned to think in this growth mindset.” He also emphasized a push into “horizontal” technology improvements, including AI-assisted “Vibe engineering” to compress research-to-production cycles from “five or 10 years” to “a 1 to two year cycle,” tested first in Lace and now in Acropolis.
He highlighted two flagship technology and product directions for 2026: the RealFi DApp emerging from more than a million loans in Kenya and Uganda—designed as “the ultimate bear market DApp” with off-chain, uncorrelated yields—and Hydra, which he said “truly can go a million transactions per second” on a per-DApp basis. The target is for the showcase protocols to become Hydra-enabled, achieving “Solana level speed” with minimal on-chain footprint.
Ultimately, Hoskinson presented the Pentad as a revocable, delegated executive layer rather than a centralized leadership structure, and put the onus on DReps to choose action over paralysis.
“Are you looking for perfection or are you looking to get things done?” he asked. “You’ve asked for unity. You’ve asked for growth. You’ve asked for leadership. This proposal is the beginning of answering those questions.”
At press time, ADA traded at $0.38.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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