Catalyst Selects 12 Cardano Teams With Grants Tied to User Activity

Project Catalyst named 12 teams from 117 applications on September 24, its first funding selections since October 2025. The Pilot has a 2.5 million ADA fund covering base grants, performance bonuses, and supporting activities. Selection secures a place in the program; payments depend on onboarding, delivery, and use of the new integrations.

Twelve Teams Chosen Through Community and Panel Review

Community curators narrowed the applications to 31 proposals. A panel of 35 reviewers, including 28 community members and seven Cardano Foundation representatives, assessed the finalists. Business criteria carried 70% of the score and technical criteria 30%. ADA holders did not vote on the selections.

The Pilot targets four areas: stablecoins, oracle data, programmable tokens, and on-chain identity. Six selected proposals include open-source commitments, while three pledge a share of future platform or protocol fee revenue to the Cardano treasury.

What the 12 Cardano Projects Will Build

SyncAI’s anyqr would let a customer pay an existing merchant QR code with USDCx from a Cardano wallet while the shop receives local currency. The team aims to bring the flow to mainnet and support QR payment systems across ten countries. Those merchant payments are the proposed product, not activity already recorded on Cardano mainnet.

VIA Labs’ AnyToAny combines cross-chain transfers and swaps into a route to Cardano tokens. VIA already operates messaging infrastructure; the Pilot funds the new routing experience that would connect assets on other networks or exchanges with a user’s chosen Cardano asset.

Cexplorer Pay currently provides payment links for ADA. Its selected proposal adds stablecoin invoices and checkout links, including a way for businesses to match confirmed payments with orders. The existing ADA service and the proposed stablecoin checkout are separate stages of the product.

PagFinance seeks to connect Cardano assets with Brazilian reais through PIX. Businesses would gain a route between on-chain funds and local settlement. The company’s activity on other networks does not establish that its Cardano integration is live.

In trading, House of Titans’ ATLAS is developing perpetual markets that use stablecoins as collateral and Pyth feeds for pricing. The selected work is a production integration; trading with real funds on Cardano is not part of the current announcement.

Dano Finance proposes a single-transaction collateral swap, allowing a borrower to replace the asset backing a loan without first closing the position. It also intends to open liquidations to independent participants, extending its existing lending product with new transaction paths.

Liqwid Labs will work on verifying signed Pyth prices inside lending transactions. Liqwid already operates a Cardano lending market. The grant covers the additional oracle path for actions such as borrowing and liquidation, rather than the creation of a new lending protocol.

L4VA Technologies is adding Pyth data and stablecoin settlement to its tokenized asset vault work. Its proposal also describes AI-assisted strategies operating within limits set by vault governance. Those specific functions are the funded integration and should be distinguished from L4VA’s existing vault development.

Aline Health focuses on medical travel. Its verifiable credentials would allow participants to check identities and qualifications without placing patient records on Cardano.

Nucast’s nuhuman brings the identity theme into an export supply chain. It proposes digital identities for processing robots and shrimp batches, with signed production records linking equipment and goods to traceability data.

Anvil is building issuer-defined transfer rules for real-world assets on its Wayup marketplace. Conditions such as buyer eligibility would be checked when an asset changes hands. The marketplace exists; this controlled settlement function is the new work.

GreenSun Tech’s OriLife proposes tokens tied to agricultural produce, with programmable rules for verified transfers between growers and buyers. The Pilot funds the transfer mechanism, which must move beyond product records to transactions on Cardano mainnet.

Grant Payments Follow the New Integrations’ Usage

Successful onboarding unlocks the first 40% of a grant. Up to another 40% depends on adoption against the target in each team’s proposal. The final 20% requires activity to continue for roughly two months after the main measurement period. Teams have up to three months from the Pilot’s launch to demonstrate their integrations on Cardano mainnet.

Catalyst will count qualifying network fees from external users interacting with each declared integration. Team-controlled wallets are excluded, and results will be published on a public dashboard. A mainnet demonstration establishes that a function works; the subsequent record will determine whether people actually use the QR payment flow, new lending actions, credentials, and controlled asset transfers, and how much of each grant the team earns.