EMURGO Leaves Intersect Board and Resigns as Cardano DRep

Editor’s note: ChileStakePo was selected by EMURGO as one of its 7 independent DReps in June 2025. This delegation was later revoked. This article is based on verifiable on-chain data, public corporate records, and primary sources.

On August 3, 2026, EMURGO announced its immediate resignation from the Intersect board and its intention to deregister its role as a Cardano DRep. A month earlier, on July 8, it had done the same with Pentad, the coalition that managed 70 million ADA from the treasury, as reported by The Block.

In less than 30 days, one of Cardano’s three founding entities abandoned all participation in the ecosystem’s governance. The news was covered by outlets like KuCoin and Crypto-Economy, but with almost no depth: repeated official statements, no on-chain data, no context.

This article aims to fill that gap. What happened? The short answer is SecondFi. The long answer — the one we explain here — is a chain of decisions that had been building since 2023.

What Cardano governance loses

To grasp the scale of this exit, you have to understand what EMURGO represented. It received 2.074 billion ADA in the 2017 genesis. With it, it built Yoroi, Cardano’s first light wallet — launched in 2018, before smart contracts or stablecoins existed — which reached two million users. For most ADA holders, Yoroi was their entry point.

It also built an investment arm. EMURGO Africa, with its Adaverse accelerator, funded startups across the continent. EMURGO Ventures invested in infrastructure and tokenization. Combined, the portfolio listed on emurgo.io exceeded 23 direct investments and 10 strategic partnerships.

In governance, EMURGO operated two DReps: EMURGO (DRep 53942) and Yoroi (DRep 60721). Together they hold 871 million ADA in voting power. The exit leaves the ecosystem without a significant portion of its electoral weight. And there’s one fact Cardano’s transparency lets us verify: the delegation of the genesis funds was never modified.

SELECT dv.addr_id, dh.id AS drep_id, b.time, b.block_no
FROM delegation_vote dv
JOIN tx t ON t.id = dv.tx_id
JOIN block b ON b.id = t.block_id
JOIN drep_hash dh ON dh.id = dv.drep_hash_id
WHERE dv.addr_id = ANY(ARRAY[5266399,5266424,5266420,5266415,163616])
ORDER BY dv.addr_id, b.time;

What happened: from leadership change to collapse

On April 16, 2025, Ken Kodama — EMURGO’s founder and Cardano co-founder — stepped down as CEO. He was replaced by Phillip Pon, according to the official announcement.

Sixteen days later, on May 2, the first two entities of Kodama’s family office, Synapse Capital, were incorporated in Singapore: Synapse Capital PTE LTD (UEN 202519062K) and Synapse Capital FUND PTE LTD (UEN 202519047Z). A third — Synapse Capital MANAGEMENT PTE LTD (UEN 202525353E) — followed on June 10. All three appear in ACRA’s public registry with a single owner each. Kodama describes them on LinkedIn as «a single-family office dedicated to long-term asset management,» and the Milken Institute lists him as «Founder & CEO of Synapse Capital.»

But the restructuring had started earlier. In March 2023, EMURGO Japan — the original entity founded in Tokyo in 2017, corporate number 2120001206714 — was liquidated (閉鎖) according to gBizINFO. That same year, EMURGO Ventures was renamed Taisu Ventures and migrated to an offshore structure in the British Virgin Islands and Cayman Islands. EMURGO Africa merged with Kepple in Dubai. In September 2025, EMURGO publicly admitted that EMURGO Africa and EMURGO Labs «are independent entities» and that EMURGO Group «has no involvement in their operations.»

Meanwhile, EMURGO was preparing Yoroi’s relaunch as SecondFi, a wallet with DeFi features and a Visa card. The website promised «Enterprise-grade security» and «2M+ users worldwide,» according to Wayback Machine captures from May 2026. On June 8, 2026, build 10.0.3 went into production. The new signer, an experimental SDK called @stashers.io/trantor labeled «hack, unfinished, pending audit» by its own creator, had a bug in the key adapter: the Ed25519 nonce was publicly computable. Tibane Labs documented the finding: «It wasn’t nonce reuse. Ed25519 was done wrong.»

The exploit

On June 21 at 20:29:41 UTC, two attacker addresses activated simultaneously.

SELECT o.stake_address_id, (MAX(o.value)/1e6)::numeric(18,2) as drained_ada,
       MIN(b.time) as drain_time
FROM tx_out o2
JOIN tx t ON t.id = o2.tx_id
JOIN block b ON b.id = t.block_id
LEFT JOIN tx_out o ON o.consumed_by_tx_id = t.id
WHERE o2.address = 'addr1q82jlp2u0ezv2hsf6f40fkrv49hd72yv442nmrr5qeultpqamepaykp3m564hnd4zp75wxxds2j6d3ywvc8prhf2kcxqn6nql3'
  AND o.stake_address_id IS NOT NULL
  AND b.time BETWEEN '2026-06-21' AND '2026-06-23'
GROUP BY o.stake_address_id
ORDER BY drain_time;

For the technical details of the exploit, the cryptographic bug, and the affected wallets, see our guide to the SecondFi incident.

The rescue

The official narrative described the response as a preventive white-hat rescue. The on-chain data tells a different story.

SELECT o.stake_address_id, sa.view,
       (SUM(o.value)/1e6)::numeric(18,2) as ada, b.time
FROM tx_out o2
JOIN tx t ON t.id = o2.tx_id
JOIN block b ON b.id = t.block_id
LEFT JOIN tx_out o ON o.consumed_by_tx_id = t.id
LEFT JOIN stake_address sa ON sa.id = o.stake_address_id
WHERE o2.address = 'addr1qyjfzgs74e90e7yk5yw7gey0ct35su6qmjsufpjc9w9t0ljf6fs0lrl9v94vqc0aw07wpt7l8l4q354l2az77ca82v2svfvlhl'
  AND b.time >= '2026-06-24' AND b.time <= '2026-06-26'
  AND o.stake_address_id IS NOT NULL
GROUP BY o.stake_address_id, sa.view, b.time
ORDER BY ada DESC;

The resignations

On July 22, SecondFi shut down permanently. The support page acknowledged the code was «published without authorisation» and that they were «cooperating with relevant authorities» (SecondFi KB, via Wayback Machine).

Then came the exits: Pentad on July 8. Intersect on August 3. And the DRep «in due course.» A week before the announcement, EMURGO had posted a Product Lead (part-time) job on LinkedIn with a contract until December 31, 2026 (LinkedIn Jobs).

Open questions

Where are the 186 million ADA delegated to its DRep?

SELECT (SUM(value)/1e6)::numeric(18,2) as ada, COUNT(*) as utxos
FROM tx_out
WHERE stake_address_id = ANY(ARRAY[5266399,5266424,5266420,5266415,163616])
  AND consumed_by_tx_id IS NULL
GROUP BY stake_address_id;

Who authorized replacing an audited signer with experimental code?

@stashers.io/trantor: «hack, unfinished, pending audit» — according to Tibane Labs’ supply chain analysis. Yet it reached production. No one has been publicly identified as responsible.

What happened to the investments that were actually made?

More than 23 startups funded. Subsidiaries spun off into BVI and Cayman, with no public record of beneficiaries. Did the ecosystem retain any of that value?

What’s next for EMURGO?

The part-time Product Lead job posting suggests there is no product plan. The contract runs until December 31. Meanwhile, the genesis funds haven’t moved.

EMURGO built Cardano’s first wallet. It invested across three continents. It was the commercial engine of an ecosystem that had no smart contracts and no DeFi. And it also made decisions that led to an exploit, a questionable rescue, and an abandonment of governance.

The genesis funds are intact. The questions remain open.

Sources: Tibane Labs, ACRA/RecordOwl, gBizINFO (Japan), Wayback Machine, LinkedIn, The Block, Cardano Forum, on-chain data verified against dbsync (Cardano mainnet), @emurgo_io.