Cardano shares $77M of tokens to 11 delegated reps for resilience and diversity goals

Cardano Foundation has delegated a total of 220 million ADA to 11 selected Delegated DReps, which to $77 million at current prices.

All 11 of these representatives were chosen by the community or are prominent figures in the Cardano ecosystem who vote on governance issues on behalf of delegated token holders under Cardanos decentralized governance model.

The delegation targets DReps in the Adoption and Operations categories and resilience and diversity. At current prices, the 220 million ADA pledged towards the endeavor equates to about $77 million.

builds on a program from 2025 when the Foundation delegated 140 million ADA to seven DReps in the development sector, bringing their total community delegations to 360 million ADA. In this way, the foundation is also reducing its self-delegation influence in a bid to further decentralize power.

The end goal is to empower more community members governance while reducing centralization risks and ensuring the perspectives that shape the projects future are as diverse and decentralized as possible.

The 11 DReps selected by the Foundation include Ha-Nguyen, Patrick Tobler, Florian Volery, Goofycrisp, James Meidinger, Phillerino, Martin Lang, Dmytro Stashenko, Ian Hartwell, Mike and Dave.

Community members have reacted to the news with a warm it as a positive step for decentralization and participation.

To be clear, the delegated tokens are not giveaways. The Foundation only delegated voting power from its token stash to trusted community reps who are expected to vote to push the ecosystems interests forward.

In the meantime, the ADA will remain staked or under the control of the Foundation.

In November 2025, a group of Cardano organizations, known as the Cardano Pentad, presented a proposal to withdraw 70 million ADA directly from the community treasury to fund critical integrations considered vital to the networks 2026 growth plan.

The of Input|Output, EMURGO, the Cardano Foundation, Intersect, and Midnight Foundation, claimed the budget would support five key pillars of the ecosystem, including tier-one stablecoins, institutional custody and wallets, advanced analytics, cross-chain and pricing oracles.

“We view this $ADA allocation as a necessary catalyst to integrate Cardano into the wider blockchain economy and support the networks long-term economic sustainability,” the Cardano Foundation wrote about the proposal on X.

Those integrations are intended to provide the required infrastructure for the DeFi sector, real-world and institutional participation. The proposal quickly achieved the required threshold, which is over 50% yes votes from active DReps, in over two days, setting a record as one of the fastest DRep approvals in Cardano history.

However, it still required the Constitutional Committee to sign off on it, so ratification did not happen until January 2026. The initiative aligns with the ultimate goal to strengthen the Cardano ecosystem without depending on like some other chains.