Cardano’s Treasury Spent Millions While ADA Price Sinks – Community Demands Answers!

Cardano just dropped to 13th place on CoinMarketCap. For long-time holders, that is a brutal milestone. The project once sat in the top three. Now it sits below tokens many in crypto have never heard of.

The price tells the story. ADA is down. The market cap has not recovered to 2018 levels. Holders who stayed through years of development are watching their investments stall while other projects rip.

One community member finally said what many are thinking.

Bobcorn, a Cardano-focused account on X, let loose. He called out the treasury spending, the Catalyst funding rounds, the Intersect committees, and the constant flow of infrastructure projects. He said the community is funding things nobody asked for while the ADA price sinks and pools retire.

He pointed out that developers on the payroll and engineers being retained are nice, but the market cap keeps dropping. He said people are losing their life savings, holders are losing faith, and the treasury keeps spending.

Bobcorn wrote: “At the end of the day, we are dropping further down the drain, people are losing their lifesavings, holders losing faith, more pools retiring. Yet you want to keep funding IOG and infrastructure and paying for shit nobody asked for while they sell the ada they receive and have no skin in the game.”

He called out Charles Hoskinson directly, saying the spending is “spearheaded and encouraged” by him. He ended with a blunt message: “Stop funding this madness.”

The Other Side of the Story

The treasury spending bobcorn is attacking has a purpose. In August 2025, the Cardano community approved a $71 million treasury fund dedicated to core protocol upgrades. Those upgrades include Ouroboros Leios for scalability and Hydra for fast transactions. Development has not stopped. Node 10.7.0 entered testing in March 2026, bringing features like UTxO-HD storage. The “van Rossem” hard fork is on the roadmap.

The argument from Input Output and the broader development community is simple: building takes time, and infrastructure spending now pays off later. The treasury exists to fund exactly this kind of work.

But for holders who bought in years ago, that argument is wearing thin. Cardano is still below its 2018 market cap. Other Layer 1 networks have surged ahead. Solana, Tron, and even tokens like LEO now sit above ADA in the rankings.

The divide in Cardano is now out in the open. One side sees the treasury as essential for long-term growth. The other side sees it as a money pit that rewards developers while retail holders bleed.

Bobcorn’s post struck a nerve because it put the frustration into plain words. Whether the community listens or dismisses it as noise is another question. But the question itself is not going away.

Read also: The First USDCx Data on Cardano Is In, and It’s Strong