Blockfrost Says It Will Wind Down Hosted API if ₳9.83 Million Cardano Treasury Proposal Fails

Blockfrost plans to wind down its hosted Cardano API if a request for ₳9,832,979 from the Cardano Treasury fails to receive sufficient support, Mahut confirmed during a governance discussion about the proposal.

Voting on the on-chain governance action remains open until July 28, 2026. Approval would fund continued operations during an 18-month transition and move Blockfrost’s source code, domains, trademarks and infrastructure into community stewardship.

Cardano’s consensus protocol and block production would not be affected by a Blockfrost shutdown. However, wallets, applications, exchanges and other products using its API to access blockchain data or submit transactions would need to migrate to another provider or operate their own node and indexing infrastructure.

Blockfrost Confirms Hosted API Wind-Down Plan

Blockfrost provides a hosted REST API that allows developers to read Cardano blockchain data and submit transactions without maintaining their own Cardano node, indexer and supporting infrastructure.

The proposal to move Blockfrost under community governance was already public. During the latest discussion, Mahut directly described the team’s plan if the requested Treasury funding is rejected:

“If this is not funded, we don’t plan to continue with Blockfrost as a service. So we will wind down the operations.”

Blockfrost presented the same position in its official article about the service’s future. Its open-source code would remain available, but the existing hosted service would not continue under the current plan.

No shutdown date, endpoint deprecation schedule or migration process has been announced. The statement describes an operational wind-down rather than an immediate interruption when voting closes.

Other organizations could continue using the open-source technology, but operating it independently would require hardware, network capacity, security, maintenance and continuous technical support. The current service also includes public endpoints, existing integrations and operational infrastructure used across Cardano’s application layer.

Blockfrost was founded by Five Binaries in 2020. Mahut said the product was transferred to Input Output in 2024 and is now owned exclusively by the company, which submitted the Treasury proposal. Mahut and Five Binaries no longer hold an ownership position in the service.

According to the formal proposal, Blockfrost recorded 781,000 unique users, processed 1.84 billion API requests and delivered more than seven terabytes of data during the latest measured month. The proposal also states that more than half of Cardano transactions in most epochs are submitted through Blockfrost.

Mahut said approximately 90% of the traffic handled by the service comes from its free tier.

Treasury Proposal Funds Operations and Community Transfer

The proposal requests ₳9,832,979, valued at $1,868,266 using the reference rate of $0.19 per ADA applied when the budget was prepared.

Staffing represents 79.1% of the request. The allocation of ₳7,780,347, or $1,478,266, would fund a six-person team consisting of one project manager, one community manager and four developers.

Mahut said the figure covers more than employee salaries. It also includes accounting, legal support, human resources and employment costs for a team operating across several countries and time zones.

Another ₳1,894,737, or $360,000, is allocated to compute resources, hosting, operational tooling and DevOps coverage. The infrastructure budget averages approximately $20,000 per month.

The remaining ₳157,895, or $30,000, would cover the legal and accounting work required to establish the nonprofit and transfer Blockfrost’s intellectual property.

The Momentum proposal page describes an independent, community-governed nonprofit. Input Output would withdraw from ownership and commercial control while retaining a temporary advisory role without voting rights during the transition.

The proposal expects the legal structure, transition architecture and a public usage dashboard to be established during the third quarter of 2026. A community board would then be elected through an on-chain vote during the fourth quarter.

Mahut said candidates would be able to nominate themselves by submitting their professional background and relevant experience. DReps would elect the permanent board.

By the first quarter of 2027, the proposal expects public API traffic across Cardano mainnet, Preview and Preprod to be served through the new infrastructure. Blockfrost’s source code, domains, trademarks and other intellectual property would also be transferred into community stewardship.

During the funded period, the service would be required to maintain at least 99% monthly availability. A public dashboard would track uptime, while quarterly technical and budget reports would document operations and expenditure. Unused funds would be returned to the Cardano Treasury.

Blockfrost has not selected a final sustainability model for the period after the transition. Mahut and community manager Beatrice Anihiri said that decision would belong to the elected board.

The proposal presents two possible structures. Under the first, the nonprofit could operate commercial services alongside the free public API. Revenue would fund the infrastructure, with any surplus returned to the Treasury.

The second model would keep the nonprofit focused on the open API, technical standards and development coordination. Independent providers would offer paid hosting, service-level agreements, support and custom development, with their contributions helping fund the free public layer.

Momentum’s public summary emphasizes the partner-led model, but the elected board would determine the final structure after the transfer.

Financial Disclosure and Oversight Questions Remain Open

Mahut did not disclose Blockfrost’s current monthly revenue or operating expenses during the discussion. He said the business operates approximately at break-even and that most revenue supports the free tier and rewards operators participating in the decentralized IceBreakers program.

The proposal provides a detailed budget for the future nonprofit but does not include financial statements for the existing commercial operation. DReps therefore have the proposed transition costs and Mahut’s description of the current financial position, but not the underlying revenue and expense figures.

Questions were also raised about transaction handling and data integrity within IceBreakers, a system that allows stake pool operators and other node operators to contribute infrastructure to Blockfrost.

Mahut said responses from IceBreaker operators are compared with Blockfrost’s internal infrastructure before being delivered to users. Data that differs from the internal quorum, including responses from nodes that are not fully synchronized, is rejected.

Submitted transactions are randomly distributed among IceBreaker operators and mirrored through Blockfrost’s own nodes. Mahut also discussed trusted execution environments and hardware attestation as a possible method for verifying that responses originate from approved software and infrastructure. That option is not a confirmed deliverable under the proposal.

When asked whether users can technically verify that Blockfrost employees do not inspect transactions before block inclusion, Mahut said no such mechanism currently exists. Users therefore place a degree of trust in Blockfrost when submitting transactions through the service.

He said the future board could receive controlled access to internal processes and verify that operational safeguards are being followed without publicly exposing customer data. The proposed governance model would add institutional oversight, but it would not provide users with an independent cryptographic method for verifying staff behavior.

The discussion also raised questions about legal due diligence covering ownership, liabilities and Blockfrost’s reported break-even position. No supporting documentation addressing those issues was presented during the session. Mahut referred the questions to the legal teams working for Input Output and Intersect.

Intersect would administer the proposal through a formal contract and milestone-based payments. Funds would be released after specified deliverables are completed and independently verified, while the legal entity and transfer of intellectual property would be established during the funded transition.

The governance session was not structured as a neutral debate between supporters and opponents. The host openly endorsed the proposal and encouraged DReps to vote in favor, while Mahut concluded by asking DReps to record a vote regardless of their position.

Voting closes on July 28. Approval would begin the contracted transfer of Blockfrost into community stewardship while maintaining the hosted API during the transition. Rejection would leave the software publicly available, but Blockfrost’s stated plan would shift from transferring the hosted service to winding down the infrastructure currently used by a significant part of Cardano’s application layer.