Committed to transparency
At the request of Input Output Global, Inc., the global law firm McDermott, Will & Schulte and the global accounting firm BDO jointly conducted an investigation concerning the ada Voucher Program, redemptions of Vouchers, Cardano blockchain upgrades, and the use of ada associated with unredeemed Vouchers. Their Investigative Report and Forensic Audit (or Investigative Report) is dated September 2nd 2025. With their permission, Input Output has made the Investigative Report public.
While we summarize below, at a very high level, several of the findings contained in the Investigative Report, we encourage everyone interested to read the Investigative Report in its entirety. Also, we note that some of the capitalized terms below are defined in the Investigative Report.
Input Output engaged McDermott and BDO in May 2025 to conduct the Investigation. It documents certain milestone events and decisions in Cardano’s 10 year history and investigates a series of public accusations made on social media alleging wrongdoing concerning the Topics of the Investigation. McDermott and BDO reviewed tens of thousands of documents, conducted a forensic on-chain and traditional forensic analysis, and completed eighteen formal interviews of current employees, former employees, Voucher Holders, service providers, community members, and other third parties in preparing the Investigative Report.
The public accusations included five principle allegations: (1) Cardano insiders stole or otherwise misused ada that should have been allocated to Voucher Holders; (2) improper sales tactics were used in connection with the Voucher Program; (3) Cardano blockchain upgrades were designed to make it difficult to redeem Vouchers; (4) Cardano blockchain upgrades deleted Voucher Holders’ “private keys” or assets; and (5) that Cardano insiders had no legal right to send unredeemed ada to Cardano Development Holdings (CDH) and decide how to spend it.
We are pleased to report that, as stated in the Investigative Report: “The Investigation determined that each of the allegations related to the Topics of Investigation do not have any basis.” Importantly, the Investigative Report determined that 14,282 Vouchers (99.2%) consisting of 25,850,401,508 of all ada sold pursuant to the Voucher Program (99.7%) have been successfully redeemed through the on-chain redemptions and Post-Sweep Redemption Project.
Among other things, the Investigation determined that the Voucher Program sales process included reasonable safeguards to prevent deceptive tactics. The terms and conditions also prohibited misrepresentations about ada's value. When distributors violated those terms, Attain investigated and suspended distributors. In stark contrast to allegations that Vouchers were primarily sold to the elderly, the Investigative Report found that only 6.11% of Vouchers were sold to those 65 and over.
The Investigative Report details the efforts to locate and redeem Voucher Holders. Following Cardano’s mainnet launch, 14,012 Vouchers (97.3%) redeemed on-chain during the Byron era, which accounted for 98.8% of all ada allocated to the Voucher Program. When on-chain redemptions were no longer available at the end of the Byron era, only 390 Vouchers (representing 318 million ada) remained unredeemed. The remaining unredeemed ada was swept into the Reserve and Sawyers set up the Post-Sweep Redemption Project and hired a dedicated project team (including consultants and private investigators) to locate, identify, and manually process remaining unredeemed Voucher Holders. The Investigative Report details findings indicating that substantial efforts were undertaken to locate and redeem Voucher Holders. At the conclusion of the Post-Sweep Redemption Project, Voucher Holders successfully redeemed 14,282 Vouchers, representing 99.7% of the ada sold in the Voucher Program. For purchasers over 65, there were only 14 Vouchers that remained unredeemed.
In July 2023, Intersect was formally established as a non-profit incorporated in Wyoming. Input Output and EMURGO each became founding members of Intersect and, as founding members, each committed to pay Intersect $500,000 a year for three years out of their own funds. In May and August 2023, 68.25 million remaining ada, which is the amount of ada associated with Vouchers that were determined to be unlikely to ever be redeemed, was transferred to CDH, a Cayman foundation, to support the Cardano ecosystem. Intersect, as administrator of CDH, used those funds to support the growth of the Cardano ecosystem through continuity contracts, grants, and other community initiatives. Some of that ada (together with funds separately provided by Input Output and EMURGO) also contributed to the initial operating budget of Intersect. A large portion of the ada transferred to CDH went towards a continuity contract with Input Output Infrastructure (IOI). IOI hired a number of subcontractors and used much of the ada it received to pay those subcontractors, with the expenditures monitored by milestone completion reports, timesheets, and public GitHub links.
The above is an unofficial summary prepared by Input Output and is qualified by the actual language contained in the Investigative Report itself.