Voice of the People

This is not a proposal I fundamentally oppose. Strike Finance has demonstrated real traction, the liquidity flywheel thesis is sound, and Cardano-native stablecoins and derivatives infrastructure are necessary for long-term ecosystem competitiveness.

However, the timing is wrong. We are in a bear market cycle where USDM depeg risk is materially elevated. Deploying 9,000,000 ADA of treasury capital into a stablecoin position — at a moment when stablecoin liquidity on Cardano is still shallow and under stress — introduces a risk profile that is inappropriate for treasury funds at this stage of the cycle. A depeg event under current conditions is a plausible scenario, not a tail risk.

I would reconsider a productive treasury deployment of this kind in a future cycle, when Cardano-native stablecoins have demonstrated sustained peg stability at greater scale and market conditions are more favorable.

The current process of pitting individual proposals against each other across unrelated domains is structurally broken, as this governance cycle has demonstrated. A budget-first, category-based approach with expert evaluation is the right direction for Cardano treasury governance to mature.

This is the critical path to Peras on mainnet. Faster finality (~2 min vs ~12 min today) is not a nice-to-have — it is a prerequisite for Cardano to be competitive as a settlement layer for high-value applications.

Tweag has been on the Cardano consensus team since January 2018. They built Ouroboros Genesis. They co-designed Peras. There is no team better positioned to carry this across the finish line.

The three work packages are correctly structured as a single pipeline: Peras v1 cannot go to mainnet without the conformance testing scaffolding that validates it under adversarial conditions. Leios cannot scale sustainably without History Expiry protecting SPO economics. Separating them would increase delivery risk, not reduce it.

History Expiry deserves specific mention: at 100–1000 TPS under Leios, full-history storage requirements would grow ~1GB/hour. Without this work, running a node becomes economically prohibitive for smaller SPOs, directly threatening decentralization. This is infrastructure that protects the network's security model, not just its performance.

Track record: ₳11M previously allocated, delivery documented. $176/hour for senior Cardano infrastructure engineers at a conservative 0.25 ADA/USD conversion is a defensible rate for this class of work.

This is exactly the kind of treasury spend the treasury exists for.

This proposal breaks from the typical pattern of my Yes votes, which have been concentrated on core protocol infrastructure. I am voting Yes here because 5am.earth demonstrates something rare in treasury proposals: a working product on Mainnet today, not a whitepaper.

Project Swaminathan is already registering 500 farmers per day on Cardano Mainnet across six districts in Maharashtra, India. 10,500 cumulative registrations as of submission. The pilot ran at 100% blockchain success rate. This is not a speculative build — it is a scale-up of a proven operational pipeline.

The core thesis is technically sound and genuinely Cardano-native. The "verify once, use many times" model leverages DIDs, eUTXO determinism, and low transaction costs in a way that is not trivially replicable on other chains. Each verified farmer record becomes shared infrastructure for credit, traceability, insurance, and government programme delivery — without each application rebuilding onboarding from scratch. That is real utility, generating real on-chain transactions.

The consortium carries weight: Syngenta Foundation India with 26,000+ Agri-Entrepreneurs already reaching 2.6M farmers, IFC/World Bank backing through the Global AE Academy, Anastasia Labs on smart contracts, Zengate for EUDR compliance, Seedstars SIGMA for credit rails. These are not placeholder names.

The financial structure is disciplined: 10M ADA hard cap with no top-up clause if ADA price falls, milestone-gated disbursements (5/2/3), surplus above $3.5M returns to Treasury. The Foundation commits to self-sustainability by 2028 without returning to the Treasury for operating costs.

I acknowledge the execution risk. Scaling from 10,500 to 500,000 verified farmers across three countries in 18 months is a 50x expansion. The 2030 projections ($900M TVL, 16-20M ADA annual protocol revenue) are aspirational and dependent on the full application ecosystem materialising. These targets should be read as directional, not contractual.

But the risk profile here is asymmetric in Cardano's favour: the infrastructure being built is open, reusable, and generates on-chain activity that benefits the protocol regardless of whether every 2030 projection is met. Partial delivery still produces real value.

Vote: YES on "Cardano Vision 2026: Human Centred, Scalable, Post Quantum Secure — IO Research"

Rationale:

Cardano's core competitive advantage is its research-driven approach. Without continued investment in consensus evolution (Leios/Peras), post-quantum cryptography, ZK infrastructure, and formal methods, Cardano loses the one differentiator that justifies its existence alongside faster, cheaper L1s. This is not optional spending — it is what makes Cardano Cardano.

CV25 delivered above targets (20% overperformance), produced 24 peer-reviewed papers, and advanced Leios, Peras, Cavefish, and ZK verification from theory to prototype. The track record supports continued funding.

I am voting Yes because rejecting this proposal would inflict more damage on the ecosystem than approving it with reservations.

However, this Yes vote comes with serious criticism on two fronts:

1. The proposal should have been split. The community asked for it. Multiple DReps asked for it. A $7.9M monolithic proposal covering 7 work packages forces an all-or-nothing decision that does not serve good governance. DReps who see clear value in post-quantum research but question the ROI of WP7 dissemination activities, for example, are forced to accept both or reject both. This is a structural failure of the proposal, not of the DReps voting No.

2. Charles Hoskinson's public response has been counterproductive. Threatening not to resubmit, warning of permanent ADA price damage, and criticizing DReps who vote No or Abstain is not how you build consensus in a decentralized governance system. A founder who responds to legitimate scrutiny with emotional pressure undermines the very governance model Cardano claims to champion. The community is not obligated to approve proposals out of fear. IO should listen to the feedback, split future proposals into independently votable components, and let each stand on its own merit.

For 2027, I expect IO Research proposals to be modular, independently votable, and responsive to DRep feedback. The research is essential. The governance approach around it needs to mature.

Vote: NO on "Pebble & Ecosystem maintenance: TypeScript core of Cardano" — HLabs

Rationale:

This proposal bundles two components with very different value propositions, and my vote reflects that asymmetry.

The tooling maintenance component (1.5 FTEs, $300K) is genuinely necessary. Mesh, Lucid Evolution, and Midgard depend on these libraries, and hard-fork compatibility is not optional. I would vote Yes on this scope if it were submitted independently.

However, 70% of this proposal ($700K, 3.5 FTEs) funds Pebble, a second smart-contract language for Cardano. The strategic argument is sound in theory — an imperative alternative to Aiken could widen the developer funnel. But timing matters more than theory.

Cardano's current priority should be consolidating adoption around existing tools, not splitting developer attention across a second language. Aiken is still maturing, its ecosystem is still growing, and the community of Cardano smart-contract developers remains small. Adding a competing language now risks fragmenting educational resources, tooling support, and developer mindshare before either language reaches critical mass.

A second language is a valid long-term goal. It is not a treasury priority in a constrained budget environment where core infrastructure proposals (Leios, IO Research, Tweag/Peras) are struggling to reach the 67% threshold.

I would reconsider this position in a future cycle where Aiken adoption has matured and the treasury is less constrained.

Note: I am voting Yes on the separate Gerolamo proposal from the same team (HLabs), which I evaluate as delivering a unique competitive advantage that no other L1 can replicate. That vote should not be read as a blanket endorsement of all HLabs proposals.

Vote: YES on "The first node in the browser; a Cardano USP" (Gerolamo) — HLabs

Rationale:

Gerolamo targets a capability that no other major L1 can replicate without redesigning its base layer. Cardano's eUTxO model, bounded block sizes, and deterministic Plutus execution make an in-browser fully-validating node technically viable here in a way it is not on Ethereum, Solana, or any account-based chain. If shipped, this becomes a concrete, demonstrable competitive advantage — not a whitepaper claim.

The engineering work required (succinct validation, compact checkpointing, embeddable verifiers) directly feeds into components Cardano needs anyway for trustless bridges and L2 infrastructure. Funding Gerolamo is funding that foundation.

I voted No on the previous bundled HLabs proposal (Pebble + Gerolamo). This proposal addresses that concern: the scope has been deliberately separated, and Gerolamo stands on its own merit with a focused 5-FTE, $1M budget that excludes block production and non-essential overhead.

The governance structure is among the strongest I have seen in any treasury proposal:

• Smart contract escrow (SundaeSwap treasury contracts, audited by TxPipe and MLabs)
• Independent oversight board (Carmuega, Rosa, Gianelloni) with pause authority
• Milestone-based disbursement with objective, publicly verifiable acceptance criteria
• Independent quarterly financial audit
• Automatic failsafe sweep of unused funds back to treasury

At ₳4,600,000 for 12 months and 5 FTEs, the cost is contained and the contingency buffer (15%, refundable) reflects lessons learned from prior proposals affected by ADA price volatility.

This is infrastructure that compounds: every wallet and dApp that integrates Gerolamo inherits trustless chain access. That is the kind of investment the treasury should be making.

Vote: YES on Tweag Core Cardano Infrastructure: Treasury Withdrawal 2026–2028

Rationale:

Peras is critical infrastructure for Cardano's consensus layer. Letting Tweag's delivery stall would directly harm the Leios roadmap and, by extension, Cardano's long-term scalability. The practical cost of voting No — losing a specialized engineering team mid-delivery — outweighs the principled objection to covering currency risk with treasury funds.

That said, this Yes vote comes with a clear expectation for future proposals:

1. No more ADA-denominated contracts without hedging mechanisms. All future treasury-funded engagements above a reasonable threshold should be denominated in stablecoins (USDCx, USDM) or include contractual volatility buffers. The treasury is not an insurance policy against ADA price fluctuations.

2. Milestone-based disbursement tied to deliverables, not lump sums released upfront. Tweag themselves acknowledged that receiving payment in milestones was part of the problem — this should become the standard, not the exception.

3. Transparent cost breakdowns per workstream. DReps need to see FTE counts, burn rates, and delivered-vs-paused scope before approving supplementary requests. A shortfall claim without auditable numbers is not sufficient.

This vote is not an endorsement of the funding structure. It is a pragmatic decision to protect ongoing critical work while demanding that the governance process prevents this situation from recurring.

Again another funding proposition related to Marketing. It is moment to fund new projects or developments, not marketing

To drive adoption is critical, specially if it's thanks to development o maintenance of the projects that already are in Cardano. Looks quite transparent proposal.

As I mentioned in other proposals, the visibility of Cardano will grow as we invest in improving the protocol, making it easier for everyone and with more features.

I see positively everything that helps to simplify/ enhance the development in Cardano, specially if it is not expensive and comes from a trusted team.

It is important to maintain critical Rust tooling and enhance developer productivity

Currently the UX in Ledger is clear enough. It's not the moment to spend in this.

It's not the moment to focus on this kind of experiments, specially when relying on "donor engagement" and tax incentives for the donors (that might change eventually)

The cost is too high keeping in mind the Regulatory complexity that it will have (different states different regulations that might change over time), and reliance on unproven waitlist conversion
Too risky

Currently, Cardano should prioritize technical development that drives innovation and organically builds brand reputation over costly marketing. We can focus on "Brand Marketing" once we have a broader-functionality ecosystem.

This kind of technical development is what we need. IOR has proven their skills and good faith already. It's critical for advancing Cardano’s scalability, sustainability, and interoperability, but also for continue writing papers that helps not only Cardano, but also Cryptos in general.

HW maintenance ensures user security. I there is no compatibility with them community would have a huge problem.

For now, I understand we should focus in one Governance tool, focusing funds in one.

GovTool is Cardano’s primary governance interface, critical for CIP-1694 and Voltaire. This would ensures accessible governance, supports DReps, users...

It's a good step in the good direction in order to decentralize API access via Icebreakers, boosting SPO revenue and developer usability

This ones drives critical scalability (Leios, Hydra), dApp security (Plutus tools), and node efficiency. It but need budget clarity and prioritization to mitigate execution risks, but it's important to fund reliable and trustful developers.

This proposal should proceed for its innovative EUTxO rollups. It might bring a great improvement in Cardano's On-chain transaction efficiency

It is necessary for maintaining critical Nix-based infrastructure, ensuring node compatibility and reliability with future developments

Since this is the first time the community is fully in charge of treasury use, it makes sense to start with a lower limit than proposed before (>=300) and increase it later if needed.
Control and understanding of our power (rights) is vital.

Hard no for now. We are still in a moment where a treasury is vital to incentivize improvement, development and other apps that will increase the use and the security of the protocol. To cut the incentive by half would increase the staking rewards a 12%, but decrease the incentive by half for development.

The live development incentivized by the self-sustainable funding (treasury) it's one of the key differences between Cardano and other cryptocurrencies, making this one non-dependant on centralised entities.