Key Takeaways
- The joint audit confirms 99.7% of voucher ADA was efficiently redeemed, with no substantiated claims of wrongdoing.
- Unclaimed ADA was allotted to Cardano Improvement Holdings for ecosystem grants and initiatives.
Enter Output World (IOG) has printed the outcomes of a months-long investigative report and forensic audit into Cardano’s ADA Voucher Program. The assessment, launched on Sept. 3, discovered no proof of wrongdoing and confirmed that almost all vouchers had been efficiently redeemed.
Performed by legislation agency McDermott, Will & Schulte and accounting agency BDO, the 128-page investigation examined voucher gross sales, redemption processes, blockchain upgrades, and the usage of unredeemed ADA.
Voucher gross sales have been the unique methodology of distributing ADA, Cardano’s native crypto asset, by means of pre-launch choices that funded the community’s early growth. Patrons acquired vouchers, offered in tranches underneath strict KYC and audited for transparency, which might later be redeemed for ADA as soon as the community was launched.
The audit was launched after allegations surfaced in Might 2025 that Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson and IOG had manipulated the blockchain in the course of the 2021 Allegra onerous fork to grab roughly $600 million in ADA, which founder Charles Hoskinson dismissed.
NFT artist Masato Alexander claimed Hoskinson used a “genesis key” to divert 318 million ADA from the reserve into different swimming pools.
Allegations dismissed
The assessment concluded that every one accusations towards the voucher program have been with out foundation. Investigators decided that the voucher program was structured with safeguards to stop misleading gross sales ways.
Opposite to allegations of concentrating on aged buyers, the investigation discovered that solely about 6% of vouchers have been offered to people aged 65 and over, with simply 14 vouchers from this age group remaining unredeemed.
The investigation additionally addressed allegations that Cardano upgrades deleted voucher holders’ “non-public keys.” As famous, voucher certificates contained redemption codes, not cryptographic keys, and people codes remained legitimate all through the redemption course of.
Based on the report, the misunderstanding originated from inaccurate translations of Japanese-language phrases comparable to “password,” which have been incorrectly known as “non-public keys” in on-line claims.
Redemption efforts
Information from the investigation confirmed that 14,282 vouchers, representing 25.9 billion ADA tokens, have been efficiently redeemed by means of on-chain redemptions and the Submit-Sweep Redemption Venture.
By the top of Cardano’s Byron period, greater than 97% of the vouchers had already been redeemed on-chain.
As of Aug. 15, 2025, 99.2% of all vouchers had been redeemed, representing 99.7% of ADA offered in this system, in line with the findings.
The remaining unclaimed ADA was legally transferred to Cardano Improvement Holdings (CDH), a Cayman basis, in 2023 and allotted to ecosystem growth, continuity contracts, and neighborhood initiatives by means of Intersect, Cardano’s governance physique.
“General, the Investigation demonstrated that Enter Output and Sawyers acted diligently and created structured safeguards to make sure handbook redemptions and accountable governance of funds,” the report concluded.
