drep1ytjyvm958ywjk...

This is a much more reasonable price tag than previously asked for this open-source infrastructure that's already embedded in MeshJS/Lucid/Evolution SDK and used by protocols. It keeps in-use public infrastructure working through the Dijkstra transition at a proportionate price.

This is Cardano's only full node wallet, and is a staple of Japanese Ada holders' user experience in token holding and transacting. It is critical that it is maintained - at least until alternatives exist - and this is a fantastic team to do so.

Blockfrost was purchased by a major investor, somehow loses money even while dominating its product market, and is now being offloaded at a loss to the treasury via this governance action. It is not the treasury's responsibility to bail out failed businesses, especially while some great alternatives are popping up. The code is open-source, so if the current team would like it to be community maintained, it simply can be without the absurd price tag.

An employer of mine is still listed as a member on the Cardano Builder DAO website, and while I'm not aware of them requesting funds this round, I prefer to play it safe and avoid any possibility of conflict of interest.

The ticketing industry suffers upwards of $3 billion of unrecoverable losses due to fraud and excessive fees; and upwards of $30 billion of overpayment by consumers due to scalpers and insider abuse. Tokenizing tickets on a blockchain and building a robust and predictable access portal for minting and transacting is one of the most promising use-cases for tokenization. In the event of a successful venture, this could also bring a consistent transaction volume to the L1 which would benefit all Ada holders. I see this as a worthy investment for the treasury, as it is a high-demand market worth capturing.

There is no information regarding FTE breakdowns. How many months will the work span? At what pay rate? For how many employees? Under which titles? $250k for "infrastructure" is a huge bill - what does this include? Are central servers being purchased? Where will they be hosted?
There is also no guarantee that TVL reaches $60M; liquidity remains valuable; profits exceed opportunity cost; or principal is ever returned.
I'd say build the product and prove it works, then come back and ask for investment. It's unproven tech, and importantly it's a Bitcoin L2 like Ordinals or Runes, so it must prove itself first.

I'd like to see some more concrete assessments of who is using Plutarch and Ply, as I'm not personally aware of anyone using them. This proposal itself has inconsistencies/contradictions quoted here:
"During a recent internal audit, MLabs counted at least 26 teams building with Plutarch and Ply."
"During a recent internal audit, MLabs conservatively counted at least 15 teams building with Plutarch and Ply."
Again, more concrete assessments would be appreciated as the only thing that matters is who uses the things being funded. Aiken is the current king of smart contract languages and developer experience, and is a stack whose toolchain handles CIP-57 blueprints itself. While diversity is nice to have, at some point there will just be a clear winner.

Mithril's security depends on signers like me contributing stake weight for free, and if the infrastructure that produces the protocol's actual guarantee is expected to run on goodwill, the same standard should apply to the open-source code contribution. There's nothing wrong with goodwill, collaborative work that improves the developer experience across the ecosystem - a lot of Cardano runs on exactly that. But the standard has to be consistent for everyone. Paying one side of the effort while the other side (the side that makes the protocol function at all) is expected to volunteer their time and expensive infrastructure creates an asymmetry I can't endorse with treasury funds. This isn't a judgment on Mithril's value or the team's work, it's that the funding model singles out code maintenance for payment while treating the equally essential signer network as free.

The TSC is foundational, non-discretionary technical governance infrastructure and one of the more productive committees for Cardano's growth and sustainability. At ~$298K for 12 months it's cheap insurance on high-consequence work, with independence safeguards against vendor capture and a strong accountability wrapper - Appold assurance, milestone drawdowns, on-chain auditability, and return of unspent funds. My one reservation is the missing FTE/rate breakdown behind WP2, which I'd want in future reporting, but it doesn't outweigh the value.

This price is enormous. Intersect makes money by taking a cut of treasury withdrawals it submits on behalf of proposers - which is a valid service, as they put up the 100k deposit so that the proposers don't have to; as well as through paid membership subscriptions. It should not be the treasury's responsibility to pay such a massive amount of Ada to keep Intersect afloat. If it is struggling financially, then it is not a sound business model. Governance will not be impacted if Intersect stops operating. Development of the Haskell node can continue in a forked repository, or repo ownership can be transferred elsewhere. The developers won't go anywhere, only the expensive administrative overhead would go away - and I happen to know from experience that their operations could be significantly cheaper, but it's the conscious choice of only a few people to continue paying for overpriced operational costs. It's time to tighten the belt by a lot of notches.

I'd like this to be the last time we fund this maintenance. I understand that Cardano's transaction volume has been lower than some other blockchains that have this hardware wallet support - and that is falsely used to measure user interest in the blockchain - but Cardano does have a very high number of real humans storing real assets on hardware wallets, versus other chains where most users are bots or people using temporary hot wallets for quick on/off-ramping. Cardano does bring these hardware wallet companies a lot of real business through sales, so in the near future it needs to become their own responsibility to keep up with the chain's growth and developments if they'd like to keep all of those paying customers.

This is cheap to maintain, so I will vote yes this year. However, in the future I will need to see real usage statistics to find out how impactful and useful Dolos really is. Who is using it? I get that it's hugely beneficial that it doesn't require a full node to run alongside it, but most teams and production setups that I'm aware of have no issues running a full node with db-sync so Dolos seems more beneficial to hobbyists at the moment from my current point of view. More usage statistics would help clear this up in the future. For now, let's see how its usage can grow over the next year.

With no profit-sharing deal there is no realistic way for the treasury to ever benefit from this grant. 3,961,538 ADA ÷ ~0.035 ADA per tx ≈ ~113 million on-chain transactions just to recoup the grant from the treasury's fee share alone. That's before any value the treasury is supposed to actually gain.
Two things make it worse for fee recovery specifically:

1. Batching is a design goal here. The proposal explicitly delivers "batched transactions" - meaning thousands of card swipes settle as one on-chain tx. That's good for users and throughput, but it deliberately minimizes the number of fee-generating transactions. Wirex's "$20B volume / 7M users" doesn't translate into 7M on-chain txs; it collapses into far fewer settlements.
2. Wirex's scale is off-chain. Card payments, Visa rails, and stablecoin banking mostly happen in Wirex's own systems. Only settlement/anchoring touches Cardano, so the on-chain fee footprint is a small fraction of the headline activity.
   Ultimately, this is an irresponsible spend, not an investment. The treasury needs to be doing much more of the latter.

Same rationale as the first submission: As a user of Eternl from the beginning, I see Eternl as critical infrastructure for the entire ecosystem and I find its maintenance costs to be very reasonable. The extra features that Eternl provides over other Cardano wallets are actually crucial for many such as myself. That is justification enough for my Yes vote. I would like to see Eternl move towards profit generation, however as a product manager myself I cannot see a realistic path to this. I do believe that someone will usually come around to offer a free version of any paywalled service, though I acknowledge that the lifespan of the free version is usually not long. All that is to say, I am interested to see where Eternl will take the paid features and how many users will pay for them.

Cardano Protocol Version 11 delivers technical improvements including a Plutus cost model update for more accurate smart contract pricing, better ledger consistency, and stronger node-level security, while laying the groundwork for the upcoming Dijkstra era and eventual Leios scaling upgrade - all as a low-disruption intra-era change that avoids launching a new ledger era, minimizing impact on wallets, exchanges, and dApps.

This deploys otherwise-idle treasury ADA into a proven, Cardano-native product rather than spending it as a grant: the treasury retains ownership throughout, and 100% of principal plus realized yield is contractually returned within 12 months, making this net-positive rather than an outflow. Strike has already shown real product-market fit with over $1.13B in cumulative volume and more than half of Cardano's trading activity - so it funds existing momentum, not a speculative bet. Custody is protected by an independent multisig that controls both funds and wind-down, so return doesn't depend on Strike, and the deployment is bounded by drawdown triggers, monthly reporting, third-party assurance, and a fresh vote for any renewal. It generates yield, keeps derivatives activity inside Cardano, and models a low-dependency approach to productive treasury use.
My only concern with this proposal is the market timing. I have a hard time letting 9 million ADA get swapped to a stablecoin at the bottom of the market, when a market rebound of significantly more than 10% is expected within the year, meaning that if the treasury held the ADA instead, it would still be 9 million ADA - whereas if Strike turns a 10% profit in USD value, that USD might not even be able to buy 9 million ADA to return to the treasury. I would like to see USDM returned to the treasury instead of ADA in this case, and for the partnership to continue for another year after that, setting the precedent that the treasury invests in yield-generating business partnerships and not just endless grants.

This reimbursement is long overdue. Send the deposit plus its lost staking rewards back to the original address and let it be done.

I have a different view of how governance should be refined, which can be read here: https://brockcardano.substack.com/p/cardano-funds-answers-to-questions

While 7 is more ideal than 5, this is a volunteer position at the moment, so it will become increasingly difficult to find people willing to do the work. If we drop below the minimum size parameter, all governance freezes until enough members are added to fill the minimum seats. Lowering the minimum (even temporarily, until compensation is decided) reduces the risk of this happening in the near future.

The ₳5,100,781 ask is small and milestone-gated, covering performance optimization (targeting 2-10x improvements in snapshot signing and memory), node operability and observability, ecosystem support, and maintenance. The work improves a system that current production users depend on, and for a reasonable price that is conscious of the current market conditions and weak Ada value.

This work delivers Peras v1 to mainnet (faster finality, ~2 min vs ~12 min) - the one item with no other funded delivery vehicle in the 2026 cycle - plus History Expiry (SPO storage economics under Leios) and Conformance Testing to de-risk both. The resubmission cuts scope from 17 packages to 3 and budget ~54% (₳18.26M vs ₳39.79M), keeping the load-bearing work and dropping peripheral tooling. Tweag has led Cardano consensus/ledger since 2018, with a disclosed rate card ($176/hr, ₳0.25/ADA) and ₳11.07M prior receipts tracked on-chain. The only tradeoff vs the original proposal is losing Peras v2's Hard Fork Combinator window, which is acceptable since v1 mainnet is the priority and v2 can follow later, hopefully in better market conditions with a stronger Ada value.

Sticking with my stance that these market conditions are not ones to be spending so much Ada on marketing/events.

The treasury is being asked to take venture-level risk without venture-level terms: 10M ADA, half of it paid unconditionally on approval, with no revenue share…The treasury is being asked to take venture-level risk without venture-level terms: 10M ADA, half of it paid unconditionally on approval, with no revenue share, no equity, and no repayment - only clawbacks on failure. The proposal frames its "return" as ecosystem value, but the treasury captures only ~20% of network transaction fees, and even on the proposal's own optimistic 112.5M-transaction-per-year projection, that share wouldn't recoup 10M ADA until well past 2030 - on forecasts that are entirely unverifiable. If the treasury is acting as a VC here, it needs a defined percentage of programme income directed back to it; as written, the upside is privatized to commercial partners while the treasury carries the cost. And the timing makes it worse: funding an expensive, return-free programme while ADA is depressed in fiat terms means spending the ecosystem's reserves cheap for nothing contractual in return. I'd support a resubmission that includes a treasury income share.

As a user of Eternl from the beginning, I see Eternl as critical infrastructure for the entire ecosystem and I find its maintenance costs to be very reasonable. The extra features that Eternl provides over other Cardano wallets are actually crucial for many such as myself. That is justification enough for my Yes vote. I would like to see Eternl move towards profit generation, however as a product manager myself I cannot see a realistic path to this. I do believe that someone will usually come around to offer a free version of any paywalled service, though I acknowledge that the lifespan of the free version is usually not long. All that is to say, I am interested to see where Eternl will take the paid features and how many users will pay for them.

I have not witnessed a heavy demand for JVM development support within Cardano, so I do not believe this is the time to spend so much on this effort. That's not to say the time won't come one day.

The budget doesn't fully reconcile. WP2's line items sum to 5.7M, not the stated 6M - a 300K gap. The year-by-year summary does put WP2 at 6M, so the shortfall is specifically in WP2's own category table. Separately, the standalone Operations table totals 1.89M, while WP1's own category split is 1M staffing + 500K ops + 500K councils = 2M - two different breakdowns of the same budget. The top-line and year columns do reconcile to 12M, but these internals don't. WP3's 1M "program reserve" carries no treasury-return commitment, unlike WP2's portfolio reserve, WP5's activation reserve, and the operational contingency - so roughly 1M is discretionary spend with no return commitment. And "Mill Law Firm" is named as the auditor doing quarterly financial reviews, which is odd, since financial audits are typically an accounting-firm task rather than a law firm's.

Sticking to my initial vote decision for this, and it's an even easier decision now that Pebble was separated: Three new nodes on the treasury payroll at once may seem like too many, however a browser-capable node is incredibly valuable. So for that alone, this has my support.

Cardano Foundation's purpose of existence is to fund things like this themselves using the massive amount of genesis ADA they were given, and the staking profits accumulated since.

Maintaining Cardano's TypeScript ecosystem is very important - so many things are built on a TypeScript stack. HLabs brings fair value for quality work, so this gets a yes from me.

Cardano Foundation's purpose of existence is to fund things like this themselves using the massive amount of genesis ADA they were given, and the staking profits accumulated since.

A very interesting RWA concept, however I have doubts about the scalability accuracy of the Bio-ID solution. Demoing one fruit being identified doesn't prove that this can be scaled to hundreds of millions of unique fruits. At very least, a larger sample size is needed. I'd want to see hundreds of unique fruits going through multiple rounds of week-separated tests to prove that skin degradation over time does not impact the unique fruit's identifiability. Even if the system achieves 99.9% accuracy that's 180,000 misidentifications per season. In a fraud-prevention context, false negatives are catastrophic, and false positives destroy farmer trust. This feels like an investment risk that the treasury is not designed or currently equipped to take on.

Cardano Foundation's purpose of existence is to fund things like this themselves using the massive amount of genesis ADA they were given, and the staking profits accumulated since.

In my opinion, IO needs to downsize its operations and take on less tasks at a time. The treasury spending expectations are wildly unrealistic. If they proposed one or two development tasks per year, they could put more focus into each task and get them finished in a more timely manner. The treasury cannot afford to be drained so heavily every year by a single organization. IO is competing heavily with itself in the amount of funding proposals they're submitting, so unfortunately this research task has been beat out by other development tasks they've proposed.

This would deliver Peras v1 and v2 mainnet readiness - the faster finality upgrade (~2 min vs ~12 min today) that has no other funded delivery vehicle anywhere in the 2026 governance cycle. Beyond Peras, the proposal covers History Expiry (critical for SPO storage sustainability under Leios throughput increases), the Hoarding Node (network observability and adversarial behaviour detection), the Hard Fork Mempool Bridger (transaction preservation during fork incidents), conformance testing for both Peras and Leios, and mutation testing infrastructure. Tweag has been embedded in Cardano's core infrastructure since 2018 - they implemented Ouroboros Genesis and led the consensus and ledger teams. Critically, Tweag's existing track record and disclosed rate card ($176/hour, ₳0.25/ADA conversion, two-year fixed-price packages) provide cost transparency. This is the model the ecosystem should reward and replicate.

The VacuumLabs co-venture is the right model - distributing stewardship of critical language infrastructure to a specialist third party is exactly the direction Cardano's development ecosystem needs to travel. Lower UPLC execution costs directly increase effective smart contract throughput without requiring protocol parameter changes. The conformance testing framework (Workstream 2) is essential infrastructure for node diversity and directly complements Tweag's own conformance testing work. The security audit of the Plutus evaluator is overdue given increasing DApp TVL. At 11.88M ADA with this co-venture structure, this is a responsible spend.

Most active Cardano developers will not use formal verification tooling in the near term, and the institutional TVL benefit that justifies the investment scale is a long-tail outcome. With all of the other developments being proposed, adding 13.08M ADA for tooling with a narrow current addressable audience is not the best use of the remaining budget. Resubmit in a future cycle once Blaster adoption among Cardano developers has broadened to justify the investment scale.

The 62.1M ADA ask covers only Q3 2026 to Q1 2027 (approximately nine months) with no published FTE breakdown, no disclosed rate card, and no competitive process. That figure demands independent justification that has not been provided. Furthermore, the parallel Tweag proposal demonstrates that non-IO teams have the depth and transparency to deliver core Cardano infrastructure competitively. Voting "Yes" on an uncontested, financially opaque maintenance would be irresponsible in my opinion.

Leios remains the most consequential long-term protocol initiative in the Cardano ecosystem. The 2030 target of 27 million monthly transactions is structurally unachievable without it. CIP-164 is merged, a public testnet is imminent, and the consortium model - explicitly including Tweag and TxPipe as delivery partners - is the right structural direction for Cardano core development. IO owns the Leios research and protocol specification, so there is no opportunity to wait for proposals from other teams here. The Leios testnet targeting June 2026 and mainnet by end-2026 are ambitious milestones that should be held to strict community accountability, however if achieved that means we can finally be done funding Leios' initial development.

I find this to be a very fair value-per-ADA proposal from the IO portfolio at only 3.6M ADA. The cardano-init scaffolding CLI, OpenZeppelin-style ContractsLibrary, unified Developer HUB, community bounties, and controlled hackathon with a built-in quantitative baseline collectively address the leading causes of developer attrition from Cardano as identified by a survey of 109 active developers. The measurable KPI (30%+ improvement in developer growth rate benchmarked against a hackathon baseline) makes this one of the few proposals in the entire portfolio with genuine accountability built in.

This should have been completed with the 2.1M ADA of funding it received last year at a high ADA-USD value. The L2 entity structure remains "under active exploration", Midgard's mainnet target depends on incomplete penetration testing, and the data availability layer is prototype-only. Given market conditions, I'm prioritizing the funding of L1 scaling initiatives before L2 developments this year.

Babel Fees and CIP-159 are features worth building, however due to the lack of budget transparency I must vote no. There's no FTE count, no per-role cost breakdown, and no individual compensation figures. Therefore it is impossible to judge whether this is a fair price or not.

This is a commercial DeFi product with a viable venture capital funding pathway. Treasury funds may occasionally be used to fund products with high user acquisition potential but a lack of early-day profit generation, but should not subsidise products with established profit models when private capital alternatives exist. The BitVM bridge depends on technology whose honest-operator security assumptions are not yet battle-tested at production scale.

It is not the treasury's responsibility to fund updates to profit-generating products that were acquired by founding entities.

Three new nodes on the treasury payroll at once may seem like too many, however a browser-capable node is incredibly valuable. So for that alone, this has my support.