Withdraw 540,750 ada for by TxPipe Dolos: Maintaining Cardano's Lightweight D...

This proposal requests 420,000 ADA (plus a 105,000 ADA contingency reserve) to fund a part-time maintainer for Dolos(https://github.com/txpipe/dolos) over 12 months at an annual rate of $105,000 USD, continuing the open-source maintenance initiative funded through Intersect's treasury process in the previous cycle. The new grant period would begin after the closure of the existing contract, ensuring uninterrupted maintenance coverage.

Dolos is a lightweight Cardano data node built in Rust, designed to provide efficient access to chain data without the overhead of traditional full nodes and consuming a fraction of the resources. It connects directly to the Cardano network, indexes the full breadth of ledger primitives, and exposes five query interfaces including Mini-Blockfrost (HTTP), UTxO-RPC (gRPC), Mini-Kupo (pattern-matching UTxO queries), and an Ouroboros N2C unix socket compatible with Cardano-cli, Ogmios, and other existing tooling.

With 939 commits, 80 releases, 129 stars, 51 forks, and 27 contributors, Dolos stands as a strong example of open-source development in the Cardano ecosystem. The project remains fully open-source and actively welcomes contributions from the broader developer community.

The maintainer's work is organized across three areas, to ensure Dolos remains usable, reliable, and up to date as a lightweight, resource-efficient gateway to Cardano chain data:

• Essential maintenance of the codebase, including dependency updates, Cardano protocol compatibility, performance improvements, bug fixing and documentation.
• Community support includes issue triage, review of external contributions, enhancements driven by ecosystem feedback, and public communication with the developer community.
• And as an important addition to the maintenance scope, we'll focus on upgrading Dolos compatibility with AI-driven development workflows by providing AI-friendly documentation and integration resources.

Strategic Pillar Alignment

Dolos aligns to Pillar 2 through focus area A.3 (Developer Experience), specifically the open-source incentives area, which calls for incentivizing the maintenance of core Cardano SDKs, frameworks, and infrastructure in line with open-source best practices.

Dolos is a lightweight Cardano data node that provides developers and infrastructure operators with resource-efficient access to chain data through multiple API protocols (REST, gRPC, JSON-RPC, Ouroboros Node-to-Client). Maintaining Dolos ensures the continued availability of an open-source alternative for querying Cardano chain data without running a full node, while keeping it reliable and performant as adoption grows across the developer ecosystem.

Intersect Budget Process

This proposal achieved the required 67% support threshold during the 2026 Intersect Budget Process Hydra Voting phase and has therefore been advanced for on-chain Treasury Withdrawal Governance Action submission in accordance with the approved Budget Process Framework.

Net Change Limit Compliance

The requested amount does not at time of submission, on its own or in aggregate, breach the applicable 350M Net Change Limit covering Epoch 613 to Epoch 713.
In accordance with the guardrail TREASURY-02a, this withdrawal does not exceed the NCL at the moment of submission.

Audit & Oversight

Audit and oversight costs are included within the overhead applied to this proposal. The Intersect administration fee covers administrative oversight and is reflected within the cost of this proposal. Independent oversight will be provided through Intersect and technically capable third-party, including reporting obligations and milestone-based disbursement controls.

Prior Treasury Funding Disclosure

TxPipe has received funding through 30 Project Catalyst proposals across Funds 9 through 14, of which 26 have been successfully delivered and 4 are currently under development and on schedule.

In addition, TxPipe received open-source maintenance funding through Intersect's 2025 budget cycle for Pallas, Dolos, and UTxO RPC, all of which are being delivered on schedule.

Budget Summary

Work Package	Total (ADA)
WP1 - Dolos Maintenance and Enhancement	525,000
Intersect Budget Administration fee	15,750
Total	540,750

Intersect Budget Management Tooling

To administrate treasury funds on-chain, Intersect will utilize the treasury management smart contract framework developed by Sundae Labs. A new instance of these smart contracts has been deployed for 2026, mirroring the contracts from the 2025 budget cycle.

• The 2026 Treasury Reserve Smart Contract stake address: stake1784sdxt6jjennmstphgdu7l7c2scf5d02a6cve2dgn5s2kq5u3j9v
• The 2026 Treasury Reserve Smart Contract payment address: addr1x84sdxt6jjennmstphgdu7l7c2scf5d02a6cve2dgn5s2k8tq6vh499n88hqkrwsmealas4psng674m4sej5638fq4vqmxs59w
• The 2026 Project Specific Smart Contract payment address: addr1x9d6k9z6t6fvsetj2djmerargk475lef9gfvshy4rwh4h7jm4v295h5jepjhy5m9hj86x3dtafljj2sjepwf2xa0t0aq048cay

Specifics

Intersect will utilize a single Treasury Reserve Smart Contract (TRSC), with one Project-Specific Smart Contracts (PSSC). Intersect’s management consists of five ‘admin’ and three Intersect ‘leadership’ roles. An Oversight Committee consisting of six external, independent third-party entities will provide checks and balances on Intersect, and safeguard against errors and unilateral control. The administration of both TRSC and PSSC will be managed by Intersect, with external oversight on certain actions from the Oversight Committee.

The Oversight Committee consists of Sundae Labs, Cardano Foundation, Dquadrant, NMKR, Sundial and Eternl. Their role is to independently verify key administrative actions using on-chain logic, ensuring accuracy and consistency without exercising discretion over governance decisions.

For all details on Intersect’s configuration please see the Smart Contract Guide on the knowledgebase.

The high level permissions are as follows:

• TRSC Fund and PSSC Modify
  • Two of the five Intersect admins, two of the six trusted entities and one of the three Intersect leadership sign-off must authorize
• TRSC Disburse
  • Two of five Intersect admins, three of six trusted entities and two of three Intersect leadership sign-off must authorize
• TRSC Pause and Resume
  • Two of five Intersect admins, and one of three Intersect leadership sign-off must authorize
• TRSC Sweep
  • One of five Intersect admins, and one of three Intersect leadership sign-off must authorize
• TRSC Reorganize
  • Two of five Intersect admins and three of six trusted entities must authorize

Processes

Upon enactment of this governance action, funding for this project will be directed into the TRSC’s stake address. All instances of TRSC and PSSC can not be staked with a SPO and are delegated to the auto-abstain predefined DRep. From here funds will be withdrawn into a UTxO remaining at the TRSC payment address.

When the Legal contract is prepared and the vendor is ready, funding for this project will be transferred using the Fund action to the PSSC. All milestones will be outlined within the metadata.

A dashboard is available (treasury.sundae.fi) for the community to audit the TRSC or PSSC and track metrics related to this withdrawn ada as well as being immutably verifiable on chain.