Cardano Foundation’s CTO to step down this August

Giorgio Zinetti is stepping down as the Chief Technology Officer at Cardano Foundation after 2.5 years at the company. 

Zinetti took to X on Monday to announce he would be leaving the organization on August 31, with plans for a new adventure later in September. 

After 2.5 years, I’ll be stepping down as CTO of the Cardano Foundation at the end of August.

Time really flew. I’m proud of what we built, but even more grateful for the people I got to work with along the way.

First, a few weeks off to welcome our daughter ❤️

Then a new…

— Giorgio Zinetti (@giozzi) August 10, 2026

He joined the Cardano Foundation in 2024, where he served as the technical leader for expanding the Foundation’s projects and products, with a focus on scaling enterprise adoption.

The Foundation confirmed Zinetti’s departure in a separate post on X. 

No replacement has been named, and the company has yet to spell out how the CTO’s duties will be covered once Zinetti walks out by the end of the month. 

It, however, mentioned that the board and executive team will continue working closely with senior technical and business development staff to hold the line on enterprise adoption. 

“In line with our current roadmap, The Foundation Board and Executive team continues to work closely with our technical and senior business development leaders to maintain a direct focus on enterprise adoption,” Cardano Foundation precisely wrote on X. 

Emurgo steps down from Cardano’s governance

The Swiss-based Cardano Foundation is a not-for-profit organization tasked with advancing Cardano. 

It’s worth noting that Cardano is also supported by two other separate entities, Input Output Global (IOG) and Emurgo. All three companies work together to manage and advance the Cardano blockchain.

IOG is Cardano’s engineering and development front, led by Charles Hoskinson, while Emurgo serves as the commercial arm. 

In July, however, Emurgo announced it would step down from its duties as a member of Cardano’s governance group. The decision was made after its wallet, SecondFi, was exploited, resulting in the loss of $2.4 million ADA, as Cryptopolitan reported.

Cardano is currently the 29th-largest chain by total locked-asset value (TVL). It accounts for $69.62 million in DeFi TVL, across 69 protocols, according to on-chain data from DeFiLlama. 

At the time of writing, the native token ADA was trading at $0.1961, with $7.16 billion in market cap.

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