Every new event at the Cardano Foundation goes through five key stages: research, conceptualization, planning, execution and reporting. Working within the Cardano Ecosystem we then build in important additional layers to this cyclical process in order to ensure our work delivers for the wider Cardano ecosystem and community.
Why the first Unified Global Events Marketing Strategy worked
The 2025/26 Unified Global Events Marketing Strategy was a major success for the Cardano ecosystem. Together with EMURGO and Rare Network, the Cardano Foundation executed a 12-month, Treasury funded events series spanning four continents. From Blockchain Rio in August 2025 to WebX Asia in Tokyo in July 2026, the series included 20 unique event experiences including booths, sponsorships and side events, each providing a high profile platform for 79 Cardano projects.
Performance exceeded every metric detailed in the original Treasury proposal:
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Booth Activations reaching 8,191 total contacts
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Developer engagement securing 1,169 participating developers
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Institutional Partnerships: meaningful engagement with key 50 government and regulatory authorities, 143 corporate entities, and 26 academic institutions.
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Thought Leadership: 27 keynote addresses and panel appearances
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Media Coverage: 147 published articles and broadcast interviews
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Ecosystem Growth: the booth facilitated ecosystem growth, generating:
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1,045 Cardano wallet sign-ups (reaching 201% of the target),
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1,244 Cardano Academy subscribers (222% of the goal),
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102 hackathon registrations
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56 expert-led workshops and builder presentations hosted at the booths
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Overall visibility, digital engagement and branding recognition increased significantly, with social media channels across all three participating organizations experiencing substantial growth throughout the campaign.
In terms of our technical audience, we saw a greater developer attendance in:
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Rio de Janeiro for Latin America,
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Nairobi for Africa,
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Paris for Europe (54% of booth attendance being developers),
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Hong Kong for Asia.
The Cardano Developer Portal provided them with a perfect entry point to Cardano. It furnishes seasoned professionals with access to Java, TypeScript, Python and Rust libraries, and takes newcomers from their first transaction to the full deployment of DApps. A newly created subscription to updates on technical jobs, hackathons, or grants also increases the chances of new developers staying connected to Cardano.
The reported Impact: See the final KPI results per event here.
The clock is ticking and the potential is real
We are now at the end of one cycle and the beginning of another. As we approach TOKEN2049, we are at once excited to host the biggest Cardano event ever in Asia-Pacific while looking ahead to what’s next. We are already planning how to build on the success of this campaign with another even stronger series in 2027. This means starting now.
If this strategy is approved by the community, we would kick off this series in February 2027 with the Africa Tech Summit. Large events require extensive financial and logistical advance planning and so, with the clock ticking and deadlines looming, we want to share some more information on what this could look like.
To ensure we match and, where possible, surpass the high bar we set with the first series, we’re proposing to run this next series through the calendar year January to December 2027. Within this 12 month timeline we would target 11 world class conferences, developing activations to amplify the Cardano brand across Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, Latin America, and the USA. Each event and location are chosen to ensure maximum leverage for the team to host a cohesive, unified Cardano booth and to provide selected builders (supported via online application) with high profile opportunities to showcase their solutions, and accelerate business growth while onsite. Complementing this, each event would incorporate strategically unified Cardano branding, speaking opportunities where possible, and media outreach campaigns.
This is our 2027 Unified Marketing Events wishlist:
The 2027 strategy rests on four pillars:
1. Builders as the core ecosystem participants. This strategy exists first and foremost to give Cardano’s builders and ecosystem projects a platform at major global conferences.
2. Centralized accountability, local delivery. The Cardano Foundation holds overall responsibility for the strategy’s delivery and outcomes, ensuring accountability and consistency in Treasury reporting and branding across all activations with the support of local ecosystem partners and ambassadors.
3. Alignment with the Cardano 2030 strategic vision. This proposal directly supports Pillar 4: Community & Ecosystem Growth of the Cardano 2030 Strategy, which calls for global engagement through a market-centric approach, targeting high-impact regions, (naming LATAM, Africa, and East Asia) with localized partnerships and communication.
4. A leaner, more predictable calendar year. Each activation will concentrate resources to achieve, higher-impact moments, on a calendar which has a clearly predictable annual cadence that can be repeated going forward.
The Budget
We are budgeting for all events listed to fall within a 5M USD budget to cover the external costs of the execution, the Cardano Foundation will not generate a profit from this proposal. The full budget per event, including the split between booth costs and ecosystem travel support, updated KPI targets, Treasury withdrawal, budget dependencies and reporting mechanics will be set out in the proposal itself.
So What Next?
In order to move forward we need the support of the community. Next steps would involve finalizing and presenting a draft for a full proposal and beginning the Treasury withdrawal process, subject to NCL availability and community feedback. We’ll share further information for the 2027 events plan in due course.
We look forward to keeping the positive momentum going throughout the remainder of 2026 and 2027. We welcome all comments and thoughts - please share them in this forum. We will also host an AMA on X to further engage on this topic in the coming weeks.
The Cardano Foundation