Proof of Progress: Nicolas Jaquemart Shed's Light on Cardano Foundation's Legal Playbook

Cardano has spent most of its life being described as a research project. Nicolas Jacquemart, chief legal officer at the Cardano Foundation, does not dispute the history. "Cardano has historically spent a lot of time and money on technology, technology and development, which is good," he told Block Insider at TOKEN2049 Singapore. "But we really now need to scale up the usage of the infrastructure in a way that we haven't done before."

That sentence is the foundation's 2027 plan in one line. The interesting part is what shipped in 2026 to make it possible: a programmable token standard three years in the making, legal frameworks for tokenizing equity country by country, a spun-out identity company, and an answer, finally, to why Cardano has no US ETF.

Why the Grayscale ETF Went Away

Grayscale withdrew its Cardano ETF application in August. Jacquemart's explanation is procedural rather than political. "There are certain boxes that you need to tick to be basically eligible for a real ETF in the US, and we've been working on quite a few of those for a while," he said.

"One of the things that you need is you need a liquid futures market. And that was something that Cardano didn't get until this year."

The foundation is now working with GSR, the market maker, to improve that market. He did not put a date on a refiling, and was quick to add that retail access is not the problem. "There are enough ways to buy ADA. It's not sort of a major issue."

CIP-113: Three Years to Freeze and Seize

Cardano's extended UTXO model makes it hard to do things that are trivial on Ethereum, including giving a token issuer the power to freeze or seize tokens. "That is not as simple to do on Cardano. And that's sort of by design," Jacquemart said.

CIP-113, the programmable tokens standard, closes that gap. It launched during TOKEN2049 week after what he called "a three-year effort basically with the community," and he was careful to credit them: "They put a lot of effort into this."

Projects he named as building on it include Deploy, Liber and Braille, the last of which the foundation contracted a year ago. The foundation also used the standard on itself. "We ourselves actually just tokenized the shares of the project I was talking about before, the identity project which we spun out of CF; we just tokenized those yesterday."

Tokenization, One Legal Module at a Time

The legal angle on CIP-113 is where Jacquemart's role shows. Tokenizing equity is not one problem but a different problem in every country. "Some it's easy, some it's hard, some it's impossible still today to do it one-to-one in a clean way where the token is actually the equity, and there isn't some intermediary vehicle or SPV in between," he said. Much of what passes for tokenization on other chains, he noted, runs through special purpose vehicles precisely because the direct route is legally hard.

The foundation's answer is to build a compliance module per jurisdiction on top of the token standard. Switzerland and Germany are done. "Our next push now is to basically build out more of these modules and find partners to then tokenize things with."

Stablecoins are already there. USDC has been live on Cardano for roughly a year.

Identity: From R&D to a Company

A few years ago Charles Hoskinson was talking up digital identity as Cardano's killer use case. Jacquemart gave an update on where that went. An internal R&D effort focused on organisational identity, built around Legal Entity Identifiers and the vLEI standard, produced tooling and a phone app. "I have a credential from CF as the CLO of the Cardano Foundation, and that is derived from basically the Legal Entity Identifier. And so you can build basically this trust tree within the company."

That team has now spun out. "That R&D effort became a company now, which we are now basically closing investments for with third parties," he said. The State of Utah is among the parties the company is working with. He expects the work to flow back into blockchain identity generally, including Cardano, "because we need better identity solutions for blockchains; that is still a challenge today."

Governance at Two Years Old

Cardano's on-chain governance, in which ADA holders delegate to DReps who vote on treasury withdrawals, is about two years old. The foundation is itself a DRep and has built a governance function with its community team. It rarely withdraws from the treasury for itself; its main job is helping others do it properly.

Draper Dragon was the example. "We really helped them, together with them build the structure for that treasury withdrawal, so that it works legally, that they're good on their side as a regulated VC in the US, and that the community can easily say, hopefully, yes." He added the caveat that comes with real governance: "Obviously, there's never a guarantee because it is really an open process."

Next year the foundation will put forward its own proposal to improve the governance process. "I think we all agree that there are some areas that can be improved, like any governance system, and it's a relatively nascent one."

Where Adoption Is Coming From

Jacquemart's answer to "which projects excite you" skipped DeFi, though he named Minswap and FluidTokens as long-standing transaction builders. His pick was TVault, an Indian company putting forensic evidence data on-chain for criminal prosecutions, now one of the top five transaction builders on Cardano. "They're really doing the thing I believe blockchains were built for, which is closing a trust gap."

That is the pattern the foundation wants. "One of the things we do at CF is we try to get transaction diversity on-chain, so we don't have sole dependencies on any one industry, because that's ultimately what builds a resilient L1."

Geographically, he called Latin America "a bit of a sleeping giant." The foundation works with Petrobras in Brazil on tracing jet fuel and runs a textile traceability programme there, and he expects LatAm tokenization regulation to land around 2028 or 2029. India is the other market he keeps returning to, less for financial assets than for use cases where citizens need to trust state data.

Agentic payments also made the 2026 list. The foundation spent time on x402-style standards so AI agents can pay each other natively on Cardano.

The Honest Roadblocks

Asked what held adoption back this year, Jacquemart named token prices first, since most ecosystem businesses earn revenue in ADA. The second was reputation. "Cardano has this somewhat unfortunate in places at least reputation that it's relatively hard to work with, and I think that was kind of true three, four, five years ago. It's really not true anymore today."

On the Clarity Act, he was more pessimistic than most. He said he was sceptical from spring, when Senate Democrats had no incentive to hand the incumbent party a win before the midterms, and does not expect passage this year regardless of the result. His concern is structural: SEC rulemaking helps, but "there is just this sort of inherent fragility to rulemaking, and I do think that is a concern at least for big investments." That fragility, he noted, "helps the incumbents, including Cardano."

His case for building on Cardano in 2026 came down to Bitcoin's founding principle. "I still think on those metrics, Cardano is the best L1 aside from Bitcoin that has a full, complete feature set." Then community, then governance: "These infrastructures, if they're going to succeed for the next 50 years, need a governance layer."