Blockfrost's transformation to not-for-profit

1. Introduction

Blockfrost is the lingua franca of Cardano. It lets developers read from and interact with the Cardano blockchain through a simple, hosted REST interface — without having to run and maintain their own node. By providing an abstraction layer over raw blockchain data, Blockfrost removes the operational complexity of building on Cardano, so teams can focus on their applications instead of their infrastructure.

Blockfrost was founded in 2020 by Five Binaries and joined IOG in 2024 with the goal of decentralizing it.

2. Blockfrost's current usage metrics

According to the annual State of the Cardano Developer Ecosystem survey hosted by the Cardano Foundation, Blockfrost is the number-one hosted platform developers use in their projects, and its adoption has grown every year:

• 2022: 39.3%
• 2023: 56.5%
• 2024: 65.5%
• 2025: 71.5%

Last month alone, Blockfrost served 781k unique visitors across more than 1.84 billion API requests — almost 700 rps — and delivered over 7 TB of API data.

In most Cardano epochs, more than 50% of all transactions are submitted through Blockfrost. This was the impetus to begin decentralizing Blockfrost last year, with a mandate from the community. Since then, more than 100 Icebreakers — decentralized Blockfrost operators — have joined the effort.

3. Blockfrost's transformation to not-for-profit

Since day one, our primary mission has been to support Cardano ecosystem developers and, most importantly, to onboard new ones. At present, 90% of all Cardano traffic served through the Blockfrost API comes from the free tier, and it has been challenging to leverage the commercial model to finance this public-good operation.

We have come to a decision: we can go either fully commercial or fully public-good, but not both at the same time. The commercial path would inevitably harm adoption, as it would force us to raise prices, eliminate the free tier, and take similar steps. Given Blockfrost's importance as a critical infrastructure component, we decided this would do more harm to the ecosystem than we are willing to accept. An earlier Blockfrost proposal was not funded and we took the feedback to heart, particularly the community's hesitation around the treasury supporting a commercial venture, and have reshaped our approach accordingly. Therefore, we would like to ask the community to support transitioning Blockfrost into a fully not-for-profit, community-governed public API of Cardano.

The not-for-profit will provide an open, free, public API to everyone, covering the Cardano mainnet, preview, and preprod networks in their current format.

4. Governance

The not-for-profit governance of Blockfrost will be led by a board approved by the community, with a mandate to negotiate and lead the future of Blockfrost. The legal and organizational structure — whether a newly formed entity or integration into an existing open-source not-for-profit organization (with PRAGMA being the candidate currently under consideration) — will be determined during the formation process in consultation with the preliminary board and legal counsel, with the goal of minimizing overhead and maximizing credibility and community trust.

The board will have five seats. Four are dedicated to open-source infrastructure development entities (any company focused on Cardano infrastructure with an open-source history), and one is a community seat open to anyone, to provide proper transparency and oversight. We hope to run the elections by the end of the year, with the new board appointed no later than the end of Q1 2027.

To set up the not-for-profit and guide it through a successful transition to the board election, we will appoint a preliminary board consisting of:

• Beatrice Anihiri (Blockfrost)
• Christina Gianelloni (BlinkLabs)
• Federico Weill (TxPipe)
• Jeni Davidson (SundaeLabs)
• Francis Luz (Masumi/Begin Wallet)

During the first year of operation, IOG will hold a non-voting, purely advisory seat to help ensure a successful transition.

The infrastructure costs of running the Blockfrost service will be shared publicly and approved by the board with a public dashboard showing the current Blockfrost usage.

All Blockfrost intellectual property — including source code, trademarks, domain names, and associated assets — will be transferred to the governing not-for-profit entity, whether newly formed or existing, as part of the transition.

5. Path to sustainability

Decisions about long-term sustainability beyond the 18-month funding period will rest with the community-led board and will need to adapt to market and ecosystem conditions.

We propose that the board first consider adding a commercial offering alongside the free public API, operated by the not-for-profit itself, with all future profits returned to the Cardano Treasury. The not-for-profit would offer paid tiers — with dedicated SLAs and infrastructure — under community governance, with pricing decisions remaining under the oversight of the community-elected board, ensuring the commercial arm never undermines the free public good. In effect, the treasury's initial support becomes an investment: the ecosystem funds the transition, and commercial proceeds flow back to the community that financed it, with revenue and costs verifiable through the public dashboard and quarterly reports. Over time, commercial revenue should offset the cost of running the free tier, eliminating the need for further treasury funding.

The board could also consider a vendor-backed not-for-profit model. The not-for-profit would continue to run the free-tier public API and retain ownership of all Blockfrost intellectual property, while coordinating the product's development within a broader vendor ecosystem.

An open set of vendors, acting as official partners of the not-for-profit, would serve commercial needs beyond the free tier: any qualifying party could join, offer services on top of the public API under their own terms, and pay membership fees to the not-for-profit. Users who need a commercial solution would choose from a published list of partner vendors and negotiate directly.

The vendors could also jointly provide the technical infrastructure behind the public API itself, operating it as a federated network of operators. We hope many currently serving Icebreakers take on this role too, as they bring extensive experience running Blockfrost products.

Neither model is novel: similar structures have proven successful in other ecosystems, such as Drupal and OpenStreetMap. Both keep the public good free and community-governed while building a revenue stream that does not depend on continued treasury funding.

6. Deliverables

Sequence	Item Description
Q3 2026	Milestone 1: Entity establishment & transition kickoff Not-for-profit entity legally established (or host-organization agreement signed) under the preliminary board; technical transition architecture and migration plan published for community review; public usage dashboard live.
Q4 2026	Milestone 2: Board election Board election held via on-chain voting under publicly published rules; results verifiable on-chain and the newly elected board formally assumes its mandate from the preliminary board.
Q1 2027	Milestone 3: Transition of services All public API traffic (mainnet, preview, preprod) served by the new stack; all Blockfrost intellectual property — source code, trademarks, domain names, and associated assets — legally transferred to the governing entity; service performance maintained at current levels throughout the cutover.
Q2-Q3 2027	Milestone 4: Sustainability consultation The newly elected board opens a public discussion on the long-term sustainability model, publishes a proposal (including the vendor-backed model outlined in this document) for community feedback, and documents the outcomes and chosen direction.
2027	Operational milestones 5–12: Sustained operations Public API operated at a minimum 99% monthly uptime SLA, measured and verifiable on the public dashboard; quarterly reports published covering technical metrics and budget summary. Each monthly milestone is independently verifiable against the published dashboard data.

7. Budget Allocation

The total funding requested for this proposal is 1,868,266 USD, to be disbursed in ADA at a conversion rate of 0.19 USD per ADA — a total of 9,832,979 ADA for 18 months of operations (including the transition period).

Any unspent post-transition infrastructure budget will be returned to the treasury. The board will publish a quarterly report including technical data and a budget summary.

Component	Weight	Allocation (ADA)	Allocation (USD)
Staffing	79.1%	$1,478,266	7,780,347
Ops & Infrastructure	19.3%	$360,000	1,894,737
Legal, Accounting	1.6%	$30,000	157,895
TOTAL	100%	$1,868,266	9,832,979

The Staffing budget includes salaries for a team of six and overhead: one project manager, one community manager, and four developers. The team will deliver the technical transition and cover the ongoing maintenance and development of the product after the transition period, and may explore future directions aligned with the broader vision as capacity allows. Salaries are reported as team averages to safeguard individual privacy in line with applicable jurisdictional regulations.

The Ops & Infrastructure budget covers the entire infrastructure stack — compute, hosting, and tooling, along with the DevOps personnel who monitor and operate it — at an expected cost of approximately $20,000 per month.

The Legal & Accounting budget covers legal fees and the costs of establishing the not-for-profit entity or migrating existing services to it, including the transfer of intellectual property.

8. KPIs

Core Cardano 2030 KPIs (Adoption)	Alignment	KPI Alignment Narrative
TVL	Yes — indirectly	Blockfrost does not lock value itself, but it is the data and submission layer behind many Cardano dApps, including DeFi and RWA front-ends and the wallets that interact with TVL-bearing protocols. Keeping reliable, free access available lowers the barrier for the new applications that grow TVL.
Monthly Transactions	Yes — directly enables	Blockfrost is the submission path for a large share of Cardano transactions — more than 50% in most epochs. Sustaining this path as a free, reliable public good directly protects and grows transaction volume, letting smaller operators and new apps submit without running their own infrastructure.
Monthly Active Users (MAU)	Yes - Enables / Indirectly	The wallets and applications built on Blockfrost serve the end users counted in MAU. Lowering infrastructure cost and friction lets more applications launch and stay live, and the free-tier subsidy keeps existing apps and their users undisrupted during the transition — collectively supporting growth in active users.

8.1 Additional KPIs

Additional Cardano 2030 KPIs (Adoption)	Alignment	KPI Alignment Narrative
Reliability: Monthly Uptime (6 epochs)	Yes - Directly	Blockfrost does not produce blocks, so it does not affect protocol uptime itself; what it underpins is the reliability of the access layer most applications depend on. Decentralizing across more than 100 Icebreakers removes single points of failure, and the operational subsidy funds a DevOps team to hold the free-tier API to a 99% monthly uptime SLA throughout the transition (Milestones 6–18).
Operational Resilience: Voting Power Distribution of Controlling Stake	N/A
Operational Resilience: Alternative Full Node Clients	N/A
Revenue / Adoption: Annual Protocol Revenue	Yes - Enables	By keeping transaction submission free and reliable for a majority share of network activity, Blockfrost sustains the transaction volume that generates protocol fee revenue. Lower infrastructure costs make more applications economically viable, and protecting the free tier ensures existing apps are not disrupted — collectively supporting fee-based protocol revenue.
Governance: Drep Participation Rate	N/A
Scalability: Throughput Capacity per day	Yes — enables / indirectly	L1 throughput is set by the protocol, not the API layer, but as that capacity rises the data and submission layer must scale with it or become a bottleneck. Blockfrost's decentralized operator model distributes that load so the access layer keeps pace with rising on-chain capacity, and the subsidy keeps the free tier stable as the transition proceeds.

9. Pillars

Cardano 2030 Pillars	Alignment	Pillar Alignment Description
Pillar 1: Infrastructure & Research Excellence Keep Cardano secure, fast, and interoperable so it can host more economic activity.	Yes - Fully	Blockfrost is core access infrastructure: it keeps the chain reliably usable for applications and lowers the barrier to building on Cardano. It does not work on protocol-level research, client diversity, interoperability, or security, so its alignment is partial — concentrated on the availability, performance, and reliability of the data and submission layer rather than the base protocol.
Pillar 2: Adoption & Utility Driving widespread, non-speculative utility by focusing on high-value industry verticals, superior user experience (UX), and enterprise-grade security.	Yes - Fully	Developer experience sits at the centre of this pillar, and Blockfrost is the leading hosted platform developers use to build on Cardano, with an open-source core and a free tier that removes the cost barrier to onboarding. Keeping that access free and reliable for the 90% of developers who depend on it sustains the practical utility that the high-value verticals (DeFi, RWA, payments) and the wallets serving end users are built on.
Pillar 3: Governance Cardano governance must be hard to capture, easy to use, and paced. This builds directly on Cardano’s tripartite model of DReps, Constitutional Committee, and SPOs.	N/A
Pillar 4: Community & Ecosystem Growth Driving global engagement through a market-centric approach, cultivating a skilled developer base, and proactively demonstrating ecosystem value.	Yes - Partially	Blockfrost grows the builder community by keeping data access free for developers of all sizes, and the Icebreakers program gives independent operators — including SPOs — a new role as decentralized data providers. It does not address education pipelines or regional market strategy, so alignment with this pillar is partial.
Pillar 5: Ecosystem Sustainability & Resilience Ensuring the long-term financial health and operational integrity of the network infrastructure.	Yes - Fully	This pillar concerns the long-term operational integrity of network infrastructure, which is the core purpose of the transition. Moving Blockfrost to a community-governed not-for-profit means a critical public good is funded and overseen equitably rather than depending on a single commercial entity, with unspent budget returned to the treasury and the Icebreakers model diversifying who operates the infrastructure.

Cardano 2030 Pillars: https://product.cardano.intersectmbo.org/vision/strategy-2030/

10. Treasury Governance & Compliance

10.1 Contract Management

A written off-chain Legal Contract will be created between Input Output and the Cardano Development Holdings (CDH), as mandated by the Constitution, and will be administered by Intersect. This will include details of the project delivery schedule and dispute resolution.

10.2 Project Delivery

All milestones, acceptance criteria, payment amounts and expected delivery dates will be agreed between the Input Output and Intersect, acting on behalf of the CDH. Input Output will deliver according to the agreed-upon project schedule within the Legal Contract, of which the necessary information will be made public via the budget management platform via transaction metadata.

Defined by the milestones within a Legal Contract, Input Output will submit and attest milestone acceptance to the community, Intersect or 3rd Party Assurer.

Project progress will be monitored via Intersect's delivery assurance function which will be communicated to the community.

Acceptance of the work will be supported by a 3rd Party Assurer, who will be responsible for reviewing and signing off the work completed at each project milestone against the corresponding milestone deliverables detailed within the Legal Contract. This work is funded from a portion of this treasury withdrawal.

10.3 Auditable Accounts & Fund Delegation

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

Budget Management 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 account. All instances of TRSC and PSSC can not be staked with a SPO and will be delegated to the auto-abstain predefined DRep. From here funds will be withdrawn into a UTxO remaining at the TRSC.

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

A dashboard will be 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.

10.4 Funding Denomination

All amounts in this proposal are denominated in ada (₳). The total Treasury ask is ₳9,832,979. USD figures ($1,868,266) are provided for reference only, based on an ADA/USD rate of 0.19.

10.5 Refund Conditions

All funds not disbursed by the end of the delivery period will be returned to the Cardano Treasury. A final reconciliation will be published as part of the oversight reporting cycle. In the event of partial delivery or scope reduction, unspent funds associated with cancelled or reduced deliverables will be returned proportionally.

10.6 Prior Treasury Receipts

IO and its affiliated entities have been accountable for delivery of work funded by the Cardano Treasury over 2025/26. The total funds allocated has been ₳130,708,860 across a number of projects within Treasury Smart Contract, to date IOG has withdrawn ₳85,552,881.

Note: this does not account for Governance Actions that have been enacted in 2026 as these funds have yet to be dispersed into smart Contracts.

Workstream	Ada received	% of allocation	Corresponding Governance Action
Blockfrost	₳1,137,500	88%	8ad3d454f3496a35cb0d07b0fd32f687f66338b7d60e787fc0a22939e5d8833e#2
Catalyst	₳3,095,400	60% **	8ad3d454f3496a35cb0d07b0fd32f687f66338b7d60e787fc0a22939e5d8833e#23
IOE	₳54,130,896	56%	8ad3d454f3496a35cb0d07b0fd32f687f66338b7d60e787fc0a22939e5d8833e#1
IOR	₳26,840,000	100%	8ad3d454f3496a35cb0d07b0fd32f687f66338b7d60e787fc0a22939e5d8833e#32
Governance	₳349,085	59%	8ad3d454f3496a35cb0d07b0fd32f687f66338b7d60e787fc0a22939e5d8833e#22

**Note: for Catalyst this only reflects the workstream that focuses on the Hermes Infrastructure and UX/UI improvements, not the execution and operation of Funds 14-16. Per Info Action this is in the process of transitioning to Cardano Foundation.

10.7 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.

10.8 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.