The Cardano Atlantic Council resigns and leaves the committee one member short

The Cardano Atlantic Council resigns after the loan is ratified and before it is paid

The Cardano Atlantic Council resigned after the listing loan had been ratified but before it was paid.

At the boundary that opens epoch 597, Loan ₳5,000,000 to Expand Cardano’s Global Listings was ratified, with 75.9% of DRep power behind it and the committee in favour, Ace Alliance abstaining. At the start of epoch 598 the ledger paid the ₳5M out. It is the first treasury request structured as a loan rather than a grant. The ledger does not enforce repayment, which is governed by a loan agreement administered by Intersect. The borrower is the Snek Foundation, which wants the money to list SNEK on centralised exchanges and trading platforms, and the agreement has the loan repaid from Snek revenues at 2.44% a year within five years.

Between those two boundaries, inside epoch 597, the Cardano Atlantic Council resigned, identified by its key in the list of the seven serving members in the compensation proposal of the review of epochs 594 to 596.

Why Yoroi, YUTA and the Cardano Foundation backed the loan, and why SIPO and HOSKY abstained

Yoroi W₳llet wrote that it establishes “a repayable Treasury loan with a defined 2.44% annual interest rate” and that the Snek Foundation had paid for listings on three large exchanges itself before. YUTA was blunter about what the contract holds: “there is no collateral or guarantor, so you still essentially need to trust the snek team”, and it voted yes because the team “has a clearly observable revenue track record on-chain”, which few teams in the ecosystem have. The Cardano Foundation wrote that its concerns from the budget stage had been “substantially resolved”.

SIPO called the loan model “a significant step toward treating Cardano’s treasury not merely as a grant pool, but as a public revolving fund”, and abstained because “institutionalizing support for one specific token risks creating an implicit ‘SNEK exception’” instead of a replicable framework open to future projects. HOSKY abstained because withholding a detailed cost breakdown for strategic reasons “feels like a cop out” that keeps delegators from judging the spend. On the committee, Ace Alliance abstained because members of its consortium had helped shape the off chain loan contract, and one of the constitutional questions was whether that contract properly implements the on chain terms.

With six members the committee cannot approve withdrawals or other actions needing its ruling

With six members the committee’s yes no longer counts. The protocol carries a parameter for the minimum committee size, set to seven, and while the number of active members is below it no governance action needing a committee ruling can be ratified at all. A treasury withdrawal, a parameter change, a constitution: all of them wait.

The loan was ratified before the resignation, so its payment in epoch 598 could proceed. What had not yet cleared that boundary was now stuck.

A committee seat, a ₳70M integrations budget, its withdrawal and a ceiling extension are filed

Add Constitutional Committee Member was filed in epoch 599 to put the number back to seven, with a member chosen by participating DReps in a snap election held between late November and early December. It asks pools as well as DReps, because a change to the committee always does, and its deadline was the start of epoch 606. The review of epochs 600 to 602 has the result.

Cardano Critical Integrations Budget was filed in epoch 597 and asks the community for ₳70M for an integration fund, to bring tier one stablecoins, institutional custody and wallet infrastructure, on chain analytics, cross chain bridges and pricing oracles onto Cardano, with Intersect holding the money and releasing it against signed agreements over up to 24 months and anything unspent going back to the treasury. Its text sizes the sum as the room left under the spending period’s ceiling rather than as a costed list, and it names the vendors only once each integration is done. Withdraw ₳70,000,000 for Cardano Critical Integrations Budget followed in epoch 599 as the payment against it, and says itself that it cannot go through unless the budget is endorsed first.

2025 Net Change Limit Extension, filed in the same epoch 597, asks to move the end of the spending period from the end of epoch 604 to the end of epoch 612, with everything spent since epoch 532 still counting against the same ₳350M. Its text spells out why: a withdrawal is paid one epoch after it is ratified, so the last boundary at which a payment could be ratified and still go out inside the period was the one into epoch 603, and the withdrawal depended on a budget whose vote would not close until the start of epoch 604. Without the extension the period would close with ₳73.0M of its ₳350M unused and the ₳70M request unpaid. The extension was still open at the close of epoch 599, and the review of epochs 603 to 605 has its result.

The Ikigai deposit refund closes at 68.2%, the domain plan at 73.8%

Ikigai’s deposit reimbursement closed at the start of epoch 597 with 68.2% of DRep power, on 158 yes votes to 13 no. It asks the community for ₳103,000 to make good the ₳100,000 deposit lost on the note of thanks the first edition covers, which a bug in the node let through with a stake key that could never reclaim it, plus ₳3,000 for the rewards forgone since. The extra ₳3,000 drew most of the comment. The Eternl DRep Committee voted yes while calling it “an annoying detail” and “a premium rewards amount” for fourteen months. On the committee the Cardano Japan Council abstained because the deposit was justified and the ₳3,000 “cannot necessarily be deemed constitutional”. AdaStat voted no for a different reason: the proposal did not say who was filing it or whether the original author wanted the money back.

Securing Generic Top-Level Domains for the Cardano Ecosystem closed at the same boundary with 73.8%, asking for support for an application, paid for by the Cardano Foundation itself, to register .ada and .cardano as internet domain endings, the part of an address after the last dot. YUTA wrote that with the Cardano Foundation paying “there is no merit” in voting no or abstaining, and the Eternl DRep Committee added that the domains “could be a net loss on your balance sheet” if demand is low. hix_coffeepool☕️ voted no, writing that use “would be limited to a small portion of the existing community” and that names could be registered by third parties for impersonation. The Cardano Foundation voted yes on its own proposal as a DRep, writing that it represents its delegators as well as itself, and most of the committee abstained, Tingvard writing that a poll of sentiment “carries no on-chain effect”. Both are signals: neither moves money on its own, and the refund would still need a withdrawal of its own.

The numbers

The window recorded 684 votes, 549 from DReps, 133 from pools and 2 from committee members, with final votes from 231 distinct DReps and 107 pools. The pool figure follows the committee proposal, which pools vote on. The power delegated to DReps read ₳5.59B at epoch 599 across 855 DReps, the ten largest holding 49.4% of it, and the count with a recent vote rose from 305 to 329. The treasury reading rose ₳2.6M to ₳1.65B, a smaller rise than usual because ₳5M left it in the same span, and ₳73.0M of the ₳350M ceiling remained.