About 28 minutes into his Nov. 7 AMA, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson said he did not control Cardano's treasury or consensus and could not negotiate on behalf of all $ADA holders. His point that he cannot serve as the ecosystem's CEO raises a practical question for holders: who is accountable for the work intended to grow Cardano?
Responsibility depends on the decision. Delegated representatives, or DReps, approve treasury spending; the Constitutional Committee checks whether proposals are constitutional; and funded recipients carry out work under their proposal terms. Named administrators must oversee the use of funds and ensure deliverables are completed. Cardano's treasury guidance expressly distinguishes approval from reporting on payouts and results.
Who answers after the treasury vote?
Anyone may submit a treasury withdrawal proposal. It requires approval from DReps and the Constitutional Committee, must comply with the Constitution, and must stay within the applicable Net Change Limit—the cap on how much $ADA may leave the treasury during a given period.
Each role addresses a different question. DReps decide whether to support funding. The committee's remit is limited to checking constitutionality, and it must work transparently and publish its decisions.
The Constitution's treasury standards require proposals to specify their purpose, delivery period, costs and refund conditions, and to disclose whether the prospective recipient received treasury $ADA in the previous 24 months.
Funding requests must also set aside $ADA for periodic independent audits and oversight metrics, and name administrators to monitor spending and ensure delivery. While an administrator holds withdrawn funds before they are disbursed, the funds must be kept in separate accounts that the community can audit, subject to the Constitution's restrictions on delegation.
Cardano's accountability guidance offers practical benchmarks: open milestone reports, published spending, completion of the proposed work and, where applicable, the return of unused funds. These expectations help holders assess performance. But requiring funds for an audit is not evidence that a specific audit has taken place, and refund conditions depend on the approved terms.
AdaStat, a Cardano explorer, offers a recent example. In its Nov. 6 delivery-assurance update, Cardano organization Intersect said AdaStat's October maintenance milestone had been signed off on Nov. 2. In that account, AdaStat reported work on security, error handling, recovery and usability.
Engineering updates provide another perspective. The consensus team's Nov. 3 report connects Leios implementation and prototype work to Treasury Funding Initiative 4, and maintenance work to Initiative 17. It points to code changes and releases, allowing readers to examine tangible outputs alongside the funded scope.
The distinction between development and deployment matters. The Nov. 6 development report says the latest Leios changes on the main development branch are still development work, not a mainnet release.
Hoskinson's influence remains
According to Input Output Group's leadership page, Hoskinson remains its CEO and founder. In his AMA, he described building applications as his way of bringing people to Cardano. Later in the broadcast, around 2:19, he distinguished speaking personally to his audience from speaking as Cardano's CEO.
Responsibility for delivery is also being distributed among organizations. IO announced on Nov. 5 that consensus engineering would move to Serokell and developer experience to AlwaysTrue, with engineers moving alongside their work. The transitions are on separate schedules extending into early 2027, with public coordination through Intersect.
Holders also have a governance option: they can register as DReps, delegate their voting stake to a DRep, or change that delegation. This gives them a way to influence funding decisions and voting records. Growth still depends on the work those decisions enable, and the key test is whether promised outputs become usable products and services.
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