Withdraw 3,961,538 ada for Bringing Real-World Payments to Cardano with Wirex

Wirex addresses a key gap in Cardano’s ecosystem: the lack of integrated infrastructure to support real-world payments at scale. While Cardano has strong foundations in DeFi and decentralized applications, it currently lacks seamless rails for everyday spending, merchant acceptance, and fiat-connected financial activity.

This proposal delivers a full-stack, open-source payments infrastructure that enables onchain settlement through smart contracts while connecting Cardano to banking rails, stablecoin systems, and wallet interfaces. A core outcome is Visa card issuance linked directly to onchain balances, allowing users to spend digital assets globally at millions of merchants. The solution also supports native integration with self-custody wallets, enabling payment functionality without reliance on closed platforms.

Wirex brings proven execution capability, with 7M users, $20B+ in processed volume, and experience as a Visa Principal Member. This positions the team to accelerate deployment and drive real-world adoption.

The expected impact is a step change in Cardano’s utility, unlocking new transaction volume, user growth, and institutional participation. By enabling everyday payments, the proposal directly contributes to increased network usage and real-world economic activity onchain.

This aligns with Cardano’s vision to become a secure, reliable, and censorship-resistant blockchain powering economies and societies, by extending its capabilities into practical financial use cases and positioning it as a viable settlement layer for global commerce.

Strategic Pillar Alignment

This proposal aligns with Pillar 1 by delivering core, open-source on-chain infrastructure that expands Cardano's capacity to host real-world economic activity. The work covers smart contract engineering, account abstraction, batched transactions, settlement logic, and a wallet and API ecosystem layer. All components are released as a public good, giving wallet providers, fintechs, stablecoin issuers, and developers reusable infrastructure to build on without duplicating foundational work.

It aligns with Pillar 2 because Payments is an explicitly identified high-value vertical in the strategy framework, and this proposal delivers the infrastructure to make that vertical operational on Cardano. Wirex brings an existing, regulated payments business with more than 7 million users, over 1.5 million cards issued, and more than $20 billion in transaction volume. The Visa card integration, stablecoin-backed banking rails, and compliance architecture included in this proposal create non-speculative, enterprise-grade financial utility for ADA holders, directly addressing Pillar 2's focus on high-value verticals and enterprise security.

Both pillars are addressed as a single integrated initiative because the adoption outcomes under Pillar 2 are only achievable once the infrastructure under Pillar 1 is in place.

Intersect Budget Process

This proposal achieved the required 67% support threshold during the 2026 Intersect Budget Process Hydra Voting phase and has therefore been advanced for on-chain Treasury Withdrawal Governance Action submission in accordance with the approved Budget Process Framework.

Net Change Limit Compliance

The requested amount does not at time of submission, on its own or in aggregate, breach the applicable 350M Net Change Limit covering Epoch 613 to Epoch 713.
In accordance with the guardrail TREASURY-02a, this withdrawal does not exceed the NCL at the moment of submission.

Audit & Oversight

Audit and oversight costs are included within the overhead applied to this proposal. The Intersect administration fee covers administrative oversight and is reflected within the cost of this proposal. Independent oversight will be provided through Intersect and technically capable third-party, including reporting obligations and milestone-based disbursement controls.

Prior Treasury Funding Disclosure

Wirex have not received ada from the Cardano Treasury within the last 24 months.

Budget Summary

Work Package	Total (ADA)
WP1 – Enabling Onchain Payments & Card Infrastructure	3,846,153
Intersect Budget Administration fee	115,385
Total	3,961,538

Intersect Budget Management Tooling

To administrate treasury funds on-chain, Intersect will utilize the treasury management smart contract framework developed by Sundae Labs. A new instance of these smart contracts has been deployed for 2026, mirroring the contracts from the 2025 budget cycle.

• The 2026 Treasury Reserve Smart Contract stake address: stake1784sdxt6jjennmstphgdu7l7c2scf5d02a6cve2dgn5s2kq5u3j9v
• The 2026 Treasury Reserve Smart Contract payment address: addr1x84sdxt6jjennmstphgdu7l7c2scf5d02a6cve2dgn5s2k8tq6vh499n88hqkrwsmealas4psng674m4sej5638fq4vqmxs59w
• The 2026 Project Specific Smart Contract payment address: addr1x9d6k9z6t6fvsetj2djmerargk475lef9gfvshy4rwh4h7jm4v295h5jepjhy5m9hj86x3dtafljj2sjepwf2xa0t0aq048cay

Specifics

Intersect will utilize a single Treasury Reserve Smart Contract (TRSC), with one Project-Specific Smart Contracts (PSSC). Intersect’s management consists of five ‘admin’ and three Intersect ‘leadership’ roles. An Oversight Committee consisting of six external, independent third-party entities will provide checks and balances on Intersect, and safeguard against errors and unilateral control. The administration of both TRSC and PSSC will be managed by Intersect, with external oversight on certain actions from the Oversight Committee.

The Oversight Committee consists of Sundae Labs, Cardano Foundation, Dquadrant, NMKR, Sundial and Eternl. Their role is to independently verify key administrative actions using on-chain logic, ensuring accuracy and consistency without exercising discretion over governance decisions.

For all details on Intersect’s configuration please see the Smart Contract Guide on the knowledgebase.

The high level permissions are as follows:

• TRSC Fund and PSSC Modify
  • Two of the five Intersect admins, two of the six trusted entities and one of the three Intersect leadership sign-off must authorize
• TRSC Disburse
  • Two of five Intersect admins, three of six trusted entities and two of three Intersect leadership sign-off must authorize
• TRSC Pause and Resume
  • Two of five Intersect admins, and one of three Intersect leadership sign-off must authorize
• TRSC Sweep
  • One of five Intersect admins, and one of three Intersect leadership sign-off must authorize
• TRSC Reorganize
  • Two of five Intersect admins and three of six trusted entities must authorize

Processes

Upon enactment of this governance action, funding for this project will be directed into the TRSC’s stake address. All instances of TRSC and PSSC can not be staked with a SPO and are delegated to the auto-abstain predefined DRep. From here funds will be withdrawn into a UTxO remaining at the TRSC payment address.

When the Legal contract is prepared and the vendor is ready, funding for this project will be transferred using the Fund action to the PSSC. All milestones will be outlined within the metadata.

A dashboard is available (treasury.sundae.fi) for the community to audit the TRSC or PSSC and track metrics related to this withdrawn ada as well as being immutably verifiable on chain.