Ninety seven pools voted yes, and the eighth Cardano committee seat still fell short

The eighth seat proposal expires with 97 pools for it and none against

Add Constitutional Committee Member - Christina expired at the start of epoch 607. 97 stake pools voted yes on it, four abstained, and not a single pool voted no.

Pools do not vote by head count. What counts is the stake delegated to them, and those 97 pools controlled 17.4% of the counted pool stake against the 51% a committee change needs. Most pools simply did not vote, and their stake still counts. A silent pool’s stake may count against the proposal, count as abstaining, or drop out of the denominator altogether, depending on what its reward account points at.

The DRep side fell short too, at 53.8% of DRep power against a 67% bar. Neither threshold was met.

Why Yoroi and EMURGO voted no: the snap election filled one seat

The proposal had asked for an eighth member so that the committee would not stop functioning if one of seven resigned, which is what had happened two windows earlier. Yoroi and EMURGO, the largest DReps to vote no, accepted that risk and rejected the route. Yoroi W₳llet wrote that the snap election “was held to select one replacement Constitutional Committee member”, that Cardano Curia was chosen through it, and that “the outcome does not provide a mandate to appoint an additional member”. EMURGO wrote that “adding the runner-up cannot be considered an outcome of that election” and that the constitution neither clearly permits nor prohibits a committee larger than the one elected. hix_coffeepool☕️ wrote that voters had cast their votes “under the assumption that only one seat was being filled”, and that adding a second seat afterwards risked a precedent of off chain elections being overridden through governance actions.

YUTA wrote that with seven members at a minimum of seven, “if even one of these seven entities resigns, governance would cease”, parameter changes and hard forks included. The Eternl DRep Committee wrote that Christina “was our choice for the additional seat” and that it wanted to signal support for her candidacy even if the proposal did not pass. The Cardano Foundation voted yes while noting that a committee of eight raises the aligned votes its two thirds needs from five to six. The committee stayed at exactly seven, and the next attempt to address the risk, lowering the minimum to five instead of adding a member, is in the review of epochs 612 to 614.

The constitution passes on the third attempt

CARDANO BLOCKCHAIN ECOSYSTEM CONSTITUTION v2.4 was ratified at the start of epoch 608 with 79.85% of DRep power behind it, on 157 yes votes to 24 no, and six committee members in favour with one against. Two earlier versions had expired below the required support, at 55.6% at epoch 581 and at 64.9% at epoch 593. Compared with the second of them, this version returns three passages to the text of the original constitution, on the term for ada owners, on custodians and on independent audits. Yoroi and EMURGO, the two largest DReps that had voted no on the previous revision, switched to yes over those passages. Yoroi wrote that the reverted audit provisions were “resolving our previous concerns regarding ambiguity over responsibility, funding, and execution”, and EMURGO that its concerns about the terms for ada ownership and custodianship had been addressed, “justifying a change in our voting position”, thanking Yuta, who had led the revision. The Cardano Foundation called the return to “ada owner” less precise and accepted it “to accommodate the concerns of other major stakeholders and unblock the constitutional amendment process”.

The budget information action disappears as a separate step: a treasury withdrawal carries the requirements itself, so a project no longer needs a budget endorsed first and a payment approved second. Provisions the text calls aspirational rather than enforceable are deleted, among them codes of conduct for DReps, pool operators and the committee. Definitions arrive for terms the constitution had been using without them, such as active voting stake and net change limit. A proposal’s documents must stay immutable after submission, which closes the gap a committee member had objected to earlier in the series. The audit and oversight requirements the original constitution set for treasury requests stay, now within the withdrawal rules.

Army of Spies voted no a third time because it valued “much of the aspirational language that has been deleted”. The Eastern Cardano Council, the one committee no, read the constitution’s amendment clause as two requirements, a collective decision making process and an on chain vote of 65% of the active voting stake, and found that no such process had been “defined or agreed via an on-chain Info governance action”. The revised constitution took effect one epoch later, at the start of epoch 609, in the review of epochs 609 to 611.

DReps back the product committee’s strategy

Cardano 2030: Vision, Mission, Strategy Framework and KPIs closed at the start of epoch 608 with 67.8% of DRep power behind it, on 152 yes votes to 26 no. The draft of the same strategy that the review of epochs 588 to 590 covers had closed far below that, with more delegated power abstaining than voting yes and no combined. That draft, submitted independently by a community member, already contained a strategic plan and measurable targets. This version comes from the product committee that ran the process and sets out its vision, a strategy framework and measurable targets.

YUTA voted yes with the reservation that some target definitions “seem somewhat vague”, because the risks of moving forward without a vision or targets were “extremely high” and a first version should pass quickly. The Eternl DRep Committee voted no on the opposite reading: “anything we lock in today will age badly over the next 5 years”, and it did not want the document “turned into soft policy that quietly excludes new use-cases by labeling them off-strategy”. Dave voted no over the recommendation to fund DReps, pools and the committee “based on observable activity”, asking who would decide what counts, and Patrick_Tobler because a vision that wide “almost makes it pointless”. Two committee members voted yes and two abstained, Tingvard among them, writing that an information action “has no on-chain effect, creates no binding obligations” while supporting its intent.

₳70M out, and a ₳500,000 request filed

Withdraw ₳70,000,000 for Cardano Critical Integrations Budget was paid at the start of epoch 606, the money for stablecoin, custody, analytics, bridge and oracle integration work that the review of epochs 603 to 605 describes.

A treasury withdrawal without a title in the record, titled Cardano DeFi Liquidity Budget - Withdrawal 1 in its own document, was filed in epoch 607 for ₳500,000, the first proposed payment against the stablecoin liquidity budget endorsed at epoch 589, and it was still open at the close of the window. Its deadline was the start of epoch 614, and the review of epochs 612 to 614 has what the committee made of it.

The van Rossem naming signal and the memory increase are filed in epoch 606

Name Protocol Version 11 hard fork - van Rossem, filed in epoch 606, asks for the next hard fork to be named in memory of Max van Rossem, a DRep who co-led the working group behind the election of the first elected committee and represented the Dutch community at the constitutional convention, the same tradition that gave the last two upgrades their names. Increase Transaction and Block Memory Units (Part 1 of 2) arrived in the same epoch and is the first half of a pair: it raises the memory a Plutus script may use from 14 million to 16.5 million units in one transaction and from 62 million to 72 million in one block, the maximum increase the guardrails recommend for one step and enough to keep four transactions of the largest size in a block, and its own text says a guardrail requires the full 25% increase to come in two linked actions, both limits rising together in each. Both had deadlines at the start of epoch 613, and the review of epochs 612 to 614 has them.

The numbers

The window recorded 717 votes, 538 from DReps, 167 from pools and 12 from committee members, with final votes from 146 distinct DReps and 62 pools. The power delegated to DReps read ₳5.62B at epoch 608 across 862 DReps, the ten largest holding 49.8% of it. The treasury reading rose ₳7.93M across the three epochs to ₳1.61B, having fallen by the ₳70M payment at the start of the first of them. The committee remained at seven members, at the minimum of seven, with the revised constitution due to take effect at the next epoch boundary.