₳50M for the Orion Fund is paid, and the Foundation is backed to run Catalyst

Orion receives its first ₳50M tranche

Cardano x Draper Dragon: Orion Fund drew ₳50M from the treasury at the start of epoch 624, the largest single withdrawal since the ₳70M paid in epoch 606. It had been ratified at the start of epoch 623, before this window, on 74.9% of DRep power, and the vote itself is in the review of epochs 621 to 623. The shares in this edition are the yes power as a share of all counted power, with abstaining power left out and power that cast no ballot counted as no.

The money is the first tranche of a multi-year investment fund. The proposal describes a vehicle managed by Draper Dragon that invests in companies built on or connected to Cardano, draws on the treasury in capped tranches, and proposes to return capital to the treasury over time. The voters who backed it wrote about that return. The Cardano Foundation called it “one of the few proposals that actively seeks to grow the Treasury”, with 90% of the money deployed into the ecosystem, about 10% for operating costs including a 1.3% management fee, and no profit share for the general partner “until Treasury contributions are recouped”. The Eternl DRep Committee wrote that Draper “is an established entity” and that the proposal “favors the Cardano treasury over its own profit”. YUTA wrote that it “was not an easy decision, but the discontinuation of Catalyst became the final push”, and that it may be time to try a different approach. The treasury balance fell by ₳46.1M between the readings at epoch 623 and epoch 624, the payment less the epoch’s inflow.

A node in Go and a liquidity budget

Dingo and Cardano Defi Liquidity Budget were ratified at the start of epoch 624 and paid at the start of epoch 625, ₳7.7M together. Dingo took ₳6.9M for a new block producing node from Blink Labs, on 70.3% of DRep power from 133 yes votes, 59 no and 13 abstain. Its document describes twelve months of engineering on a node written in Go, which it places next to Amaru as a second independent implementation, priced at thirty cents per ada and paid in one go into an escrow contract that releases money against milestones and returns what is unused to the treasury at the end of its term.

The yes votes were about cost and diversity. YUTA wrote that it had run the node on the main network, that Go is easier for pool operators to evaluate than Haskell, and that “price competition in node development is extremely important”, setting three twelve month node budgets side by side: $48.4M for the existing node, $3.04M for Amaru, $2.07M for Dingo. The Eternl DRep Committee wrote that it had revised its vote on Dingo from no to yes and would support the Haskell, Rust, Go and TypeScript implementations alike, because more than one additional node is needed for them to check each other. Sebastien Guillemot セバ voted yes and called it “a hard decision”: the team had done impressive work, but Go over Rust was “a very unfortunate choice” for interoperability with the cryptography ecosystem.

The liquidity budget took ₳800,000 on 74.1%, a second try after an untitled, smaller request from the same budget had expired in epoch 614 with six committee votes against it, which the review of epochs 612 to 614 covers. The revised request lists the circumstances under which funds return to the treasury and discloses that the recipient has received no treasury ada in the previous two years, the two omissions the committee had named, and it spends the money on a legal entity, an audit of the contract and a multisig, within six months. The committee was unanimous on both payments. The Cardano Foundation commended the staged budgeting and “strongly urge[d] the resolution of outstanding transparency, operational, and security concerns” before the ₳50M withdrawal that the budget plans next. The Eternl DRep Committee wrote that costs “are higher than previously, but they need to start somewhere”. Across the three epochs the treasury paid ₳57.7M in all, and by epoch 626 four withdrawals had drawn ₳67.8M of the ₳350M ceiling for the spending period that began at epoch 613.

The Foundation is backed to run Catalyst

Approve Cardano Foundation as New Managing Entity of Project Catalyst closed at the start of epoch 626 with 83.4% of DRep power behind it, on 186 yes votes, 11 no and 4 abstain. Six committee members voted yes and one abstained. The stored pool tally holds 22 yes ballots and 2 no, with the yes side at 5.5% of stake, and only one of those pool ballots was cast inside this window, in epoch 625.

What it asks is whether the Cardano Foundation should take over the running of Project Catalyst, the community grants programme, from Input Output Group, which had run it and backs the handover. The point of asking now is continuity: teams funded in rounds ten to fourteen still need milestone reviews and payments, and those do not pause while an organisation changes. The proposal puts a date on it, saying that without approval by the end of May the operations would likely pause and disbursements be delayed, and it sets its own bar at more than 50% of the active DRep voting stake. It also says what happens to the money already set aside for the two rounds after those: if approved, the Foundation will work with Intersect to return the treasury allocations approved for rounds fifteen and sixteen to the treasury.

YUTA and the Eternl DRep Committee treated it as a formality. YUTA wrote that there is “no merit” in voting no and that the return of the money for rounds fifteen and sixteen should proceed. The Eternl DRep Committee wrote that there was “not much to approve here” and that if the two parties had agreed it did not see the point in spending time and ada on a vote. KtorZ, the committee member who abstained, called the action “a literal poll” on a community matter, out of the committee’s scope, and noted that as an employee of the Foundation some could see a conflict of interest. One stake pool wrote that Catalyst “has been in a bumpy state lately” and that the Foundation is in a position to manage it responsibly.

This is an information vote supporting an off chain transition, which is a different thing from a vote the ledger executes. The vote supports the handover, and the organisations still have to carry it out, which is the agreement they asked for before proceeding. The proposal is also explicit that the manager of Catalyst and the administrator of the ecosystem budget are separate roles, and that this changes only the first.

Nine requests for ₳162.1M

In the last epoch of the window nine treasury requests were filed together in one transaction, which changes nothing about how they are decided: each is a separate proposal with its own tally, its own committee ruling and its own deadline. They asked for ₳162.1M between them, from ₳3.6M to ₳62.1M apiece, and all nine were still open when the window closed, alongside two earlier requests. Their voting is in the review of epochs 630 to 632. For the treasury, the window ended with ₳67.8M of the ₳350M limit used and ₳162.1M more on the ballot.

The window recorded 496 ballots across the roles, superseded votes included, 148 DReps cast a final ballot somewhere in it, and the count with a ballot in the last 12 epochs read 260 at epoch 626.