Fast and Reliable Public Access to Cardano APIs

[Proposal setup] Proposal title

Please provide your proposal title

Fast and Reliable Public Access to Cardano APIs

[Proposal Summary] Budget Information

Enter the amount of funding you are requesting in ADA

100000

[Proposal Summary] Time

Please specify how many months you expect your project to last

3

[Proposal Summary] Translation Information

Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated

No

Original Language

en

[Proposal Summary] Problem Statement

What is the problem you want to solve?

Public API is the main entry point for users and developers, shaping their experience with Cardano. Slow, unreliable, fragmented or pay-walled RPC and API means degraded user experience ecosystem-wide

[Proposal Summary] Supporting Documentation

Supporting links

• https://lavanet.xyz
,
• https://github.com/lavanet/lava

[Proposal Summary] Project Dependencies

Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?

No

Describe any dependencies or write 'No dependencies'

No Dependencies

[Proposal Summary] Project Open Source

Will your project's outputs be fully open source?

Yes

License and Additional Information

Apache -2.0

[Theme Selection] Theme

Please choose the most relevant theme and tag related to the outcomes of your proposal

Infrastructure

[Campaign Category] Category Questions

Mention your open source license and describe your open source license rationale.

Lava uses the Apache 2.0 License, chosen for its permissive terms that encourage wide adoption and commercial use. This license allows developers and organizations to freely use, modify, and distribute the code, fostering collaboration, transparency, and ecosystem growth while ensuring that Lava remains accessible and beneficial to the broader community.

How do you make sure your source code is accessible to the public from project start, and people are informed?

Our source code is hosted on GitHub under an open repository, and has been open since we started the project 3.5 years ago. We announce releases in our community, and our docs make it easy to access and contribute.

How will you provide high quality documentation?

We provide detailed developer docs, tutorials, and API references on our website and GitHub. Documentation is kept up-to-date with each release, with community feedback channels ensuring clarity and completeness.

[Your Project and Solution] Solution

Please describe your proposed solution and how it addresses the problem

Lava is a decentralized protocol that provides ultra-reliable API services for any blockchain. It works by coordinating and aggregating API providers, automatically routing traffic to the most efficient and reliable nodes. The protocol uses economic incentives, including provider rewards and reputation systems, to ensure high-quality service delivery. This infrastructure is crucial for blockchain communities, enterprises, AI agents, dapps, and users who need mission-critical access to the blockchain.

We propose creating a unified, fast and reliable public API endpoint to make it easy for users and developers to interact and build on Cardano. It connects users to the best APIs available based on uptime, performance, sync and location, giving users faster queries and TXs, automatic failover and error recovery.

Lava's API is powered by Incentive Pools, which are on-chain incentives distributed to providers based on their quality of service - allowing Cardano to be flexible, transparent, avoid vendor lock-in, and engage the community.

Our solution opens up a must-have service to be powered by the community, rather than the core team and/or a small number of 3rd parties. Anyone can contribute, compete and earn rewards in an open market. The majority of the budget is circulated back into community contributors that provide valuable public good infrastructure

[Your Project and Solution] Impact

Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community

Improving user and developer onboarding will empower them to be more active on Cardano.

Opening Cardano’s public API to the community will allow anyone to contribute and compete over quality of service. This will engage the community and onboard new community members - builders, node runners, content creators.

We’ve proven this model across multiple ecosystems, with NEAR as a flagship example. Within just one year, Lava became the go-to RPC provider in the NEAR ecosystem, powering both public RPC traffic and the leading applications like Sweat Economy, Hot Wallet, Ref Finance and more.

Lava quickly scaled to serve over 50% of all NEAR RPC traffic, while onboarding 53+ independent providers into the ecosystem. This not only improved reliability and performance for users but also created a more decentralized, competitive, and community-driven infrastructure market.

How we measure impact:

1. Adoption: how many monthly RPC calls are sent, how many monthly unique users (MAUs) and applications are using Lava.

2. Community engagement: How many providers are participating, how are they performing. How much engagement does Lava and Cardano get on social media and community channels like Discord, Reddit, Farcaster.

[Your Project and Solution] Capabilities & Feasibility

What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?

Lava handles 300M+ requests daily, serving 6M users weekly, has generated $3M in ARR, and served over 135B requests to date. Our customers include Fireblocks, NEAR, Arbitrum, Starknet, Filecoin, Cosmos, Movement, Axelar and many more.

We will collaborate with Cardano developers such as Mesh, AI Quant and others.

[Milestones] Project Milestones

Milestone Title

Cardano API Specification

Milestone Outputs

A Spec in Lava is like a blueprint that defines how a blockchain API is integrated into the Lava network. Each spec describes the API methods that every provider has to support, as well as verifications that providers must pass to contribute.

Acceptance Criteria

Cardano’s API Specification is created, tested and deployed on Lava’s mainnet, including passing an on-chain governance proposal. This means providers can now join, be verified and serve Cardano API calls through the public endpoint.

Evidence of Completion

• Spec creation can be verified on Lava’s open source repo: https://github.com/lavanet/lava/tree/main/specs

Spec deployment can be verified using Lava’s block explorer. For example, Lava recently integrated Hedera: https://lava.explorers.guru/proposal/53

Delivery Month

1

Cost

50000

Progress

50 %

Milestone Title

Incentive Pool deployed

Milestone Outputs

Cardano’s Incentive Pool is live on Lava mainnet, rewarding API providers on a monthly basis, for serving traffic and ensuring reliable, decentralized access to Cardano for users and developers, across all regions.

Acceptance Criteria

Cardano’s on-chain incentive pool has been funded with LAVA tokens and is active on Lava mainnet. Rewards will be distributed to API providers at the end of the month, recognizing their service, uptime, and contribution.

Evidence of Completion

This can be verified on Lava’s block explorer (https://lava.explorers.guru/)) and is updated monthly at pools.lavanet.xyz

Delivery Month

1

Cost

25000

Progress

20 %

Milestone Title

API is Live

Milestone Outputs

Once the API Specification and Incentive Pool are live, Lava will deploy public API endpoints for Cardano. These endpoints will be openly available to teams, developers, and end users, ensuring free, reliable access.

Acceptance Criteria

Lava’s Cardano API endpoints are live, publicly listed, and tested by the community. In addition to open access, Cardano APIs are now integrated into Lava’s gateway and Smart Router - to also support premium users and enterprises.

Evidence of Completion

This milestone can verified by checking the API endpoints on Lava’s docs (docs.lavanet.xyz) and Lava’s gateway (gateway.lavanet.xyz)

Delivery Month

1

Cost

15000

Progress

10 %

Milestone Title

Adoption, Growth and Engagement

Milestone Outputs

Once the API is Live, it will run for 3 months, during which we will work together with the Cardano community to establish Lava as the go-to public endpoint of the ecosystem. This will be done through BD, Marketing and DevRel activities such as adding Lava to the Cardano docs.

Acceptance Criteria

We’re measuring Lava’s impact across multiple verticals.

We are aiming for over 25,000 MAU, 1,000,000 monthly requests, at least 20 Providers onboarded and 100,000 social engagements across our social media campaign with Cardano.

Evidence of Completion

These metrics will be shared with the community in open reports, and can also be viewed on Lava’s public resources like info.lavanet.xyz

Delivery Month

1

Cost

10000

Progress

10 %

[Final Pitch] Budget & Costs

Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources

Lava’s Incentive Pools are flexible depending on network traffic & expected growth. We propose this budget based on our success with Arbitrum, Starknet, NEAR, Movement, Filecoin, Cosmos and more.

Total budget: 100,000 ADA for 4 milestones

Milestone 1: 50,000ADA

Milestone 2: 25,000 ADA

Milestone 3: 15,000 ADA

Milestone 4: 10,000 ADA

85% of the budget is deployed on-chain and is distributed to API Providers on a monthly basis, based on their quality of service.

15% of the budget is used to cover Lava’s efforts across BD, Marketing, R&D, DevOps and Operations.

[Final Pitch] Value for Money

How does the cost of the project represent value for the Cardano ecosystem?

This proposal delivers high-leverage infrastructure at a low cost. Public API supports all users and developers on Cardano. Improving it has ecosystem-wide impact—better UX, stronger dApp performance, and higher retention.

Our requested budget takes into account:

Typical cloud + DevOps costs for high-uptime infrastructure

Benchmarks from similar grants in other ecosystems (e.g. NEAR, Filecoin)

Blockchain API costs

Cardano’s size and traffic expectations

For the Cardano ecosystem, this is a low-cost, high-impact investment in foundational infra that supports users, builders, and onboarding at scale.

[Required Acknowledgements] Consent & Confirmation

Terms and Conditions:

Yes