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 Growth Holdings for ecosystem grants and initiatives.
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Enter Output World (IOG) has revealed the outcomes of a months-long investigative report and forensic audit into Cardano’s ADA Voucher Program. The evaluation, 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 had been the unique methodology of distributing ADA, Cardano’s native crypto asset, by means of pre-launch choices that funded the community’s early improvement. Patrons acquired vouchers, bought in tranches beneath strict KYC and audited for transparency, which may 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 through the 2021 Allegra laborious 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 evaluation concluded that every one accusations towards the voucher program had been with out foundation. Investigators decided that the voucher program was structured with safeguards to stop misleading gross sales techniques.
Opposite to allegations of focusing on aged buyers, the investigation discovered that solely about 6% of vouchers had been bought 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’ “personal keys.” As famous, voucher certificates contained redemption codes, not cryptographic keys, and people codes remained legitimate all through the redemption course of.
In line with the report, the misunderstanding originated from inaccurate translations of Japanese-language phrases corresponding to “password,” which had been incorrectly known as “personal keys” in on-line claims.
Redemption efforts
Knowledge from the investigation confirmed that 14,282 vouchers, representing 25.9 billion ADA tokens, had been efficiently redeemed by means of on-chain redemptions and the Submit-Sweep Redemption Mission.
By the tip 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 bought in this system, in accordance with the findings.
The remaining unclaimed ADA was legally transferred to Cardano Growth Holdings (CDH), a Cayman basis, in 2023 and allotted to ecosystem improvement, 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.
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