A ₳150M raise in the spending limit, and the ₳120M Cardano PRIME request that needed it

DReps raise Cardano’s spending limit to ₳500M

Cardano PRIME asked the community for ₳120M for a twelve month programme to get decentralised finance protocols on Cardano ready for use, turn on incentives and build lasting liquidity, with Intersect holding the funds and releasing them against milestones. When it was submitted in epoch 642, the request did not fit under the spending limit in force. The net change limit for epochs 613 to 713, the cap on what withdrawals may take out of the treasury across that period, stood at ₳350M. The withdrawals since epoch 613 had used ₳335.6M of it before this window began and ₳337.4M by the end of epoch 649, leaving ₳12.6M. PRIME’s own document makes the withdrawal conditional on a limit with enough room to cover it in full.

The limit moved first. Net Change Limit had been submitted in epoch 640, to replace the ₳350M cap with one of ₳500M for the same period, on the argument that the room under the old limit was becoming constrained. Its vote closed at the boundary to epoch 647 with 62.4% of DRep power behind it. The limit is an info action, so the new ceiling is an agreement recorded by a vote, not a rule the chain enforces.

PRIME was ratified at the boundary to epoch 649 on 80.1% of DRep power and six committee votes, with its ₳120M due one epoch later. After that payment, ₳42.6M of the new limit remains for anything else through epoch 713. DRepTalk tracks what has been drawn against it on the treasury overview.

Why the Eternl DRep Committee and YUTA voted for the higher limit

The Eternl DRep Committee voted yes and wrote that raising the limit “to unsustainable amounts must not be the norm”, but that it did not want to block PRIME by withholding a yes. YUTA voted yes and wrote that the ceiling “is not the place to judge the merits of individual proposals”. Sebastien Guillemot セバ changed his vote to yes after, he wrote, a guarantee from the node and Plutus teams to take the programme’s feature requests seriously. The Cardano Foundation abstained: the room under the old limit was close to exhausted, it wrote, but “no basis is given for the amount”.

The committee does not decide an info action, but its members voted anyway, and two of them disagreed about whether it fell within their scope at all. The Cardano Japan Council voted no, writing that a text which sets a binding limit for the period “is not merely a statement of opinion”. KtorZ abstained as out of scope, while asking whether ₳500M squares with the constitution’s tenet against unreasonable spending.

How Yoroi and EMURGO voted

Yoroi W₳llet at ₳568.9M, the largest DRep at the end of the window, and EMURGO at ₳297.2M, the fourth largest, abstained on six of the seven actions decided here, the higher limit included. Both filed the same short rationale each time. Yoroi wrote that it was withholding its vote “in light of the current situation” and would reassess “once conditions allow for a considered decision”. EMURGO wrote that it preferred “to withhold judgment rather than vote without the certainty our mandate demands”. Blockdaemon at ₳333.6M, the third largest, abstained on all seven with no rationale in the record.

PRIME was the exception for both. Yoroi called it a “strategic exception” to a position it had “generally maintained” pending resolution of the SecondFi situation, because stalling liquidity and growth programmes would harm the ecosystem. EMURGO wrote that its general stance “has been one of abstention” since the SecondFi incident, and that this proposal was too important to sit out.

On 3 August, inside this window, EMURGO announced on X, for itself and the Yoroi DRep, its resignation from the Intersect board and its intention to deregister as a DRep in due course, to concentrate on the recovery effort for users affected by the SecondFi incident. It added that a user migrating their wallet would be undelegated from their DRep and free to choose a new one. The exception for PRIME was made by two DReps that had announced they would give up the role.

Abstaining power leaves the count, while delegated power that did not vote stays in it as no. On Scalus, ₳2.19B of DRep power abstained, ₳1.60B voted yes and ₳0.39B no. On Bifrost, ₳2.07B abstained, ₳1.09B voted yes and ₳1.12B no. The 51.8% and 33.8% were therefore set by the DReps who voted yes or no, together with the silent power counted against, and without Yoroi, Blockdaemon and EMURGO.

Four requests expired, one was paid

Scalus asked for ₳2.5M to continue nine months of work on a development platform whose components sit inside several of the toolkits other Cardano developers build with. It reached 51.8% against the 67% a withdrawal needs. The Cardano Foundation voted yes and called it a proportionate resubmission, cut from ₳8.5M to ₳2.5M. The Eternl DRep Committee wrote “they listened and the new proposal is much leaner”. Bifrost asked for ₳12.3M for the first of two phases of a bridge that would bring bitcoin onto Cardano as a native asset, and reached 33.8%. The Cardano Foundation voted no there, over the dependency on a second phase, missing vendor detail and concurrent requests from the same team. Both votes ended at the boundary to epoch 647. The committee voted yes on each with six of its seven members, which says nothing about funding: it judges only whether an action is constitutional.

Global Order Book reached 26.7% and was the one request the committee also turned down, three yes to four no, over custody: the reward account named to receive the money was delegated to a stake pool and a DRep, KtorZ wrote, which the constitution does not allow for treasury funds. The Eternl DRep Committee voted no because the request mixes public infrastructure with funding for the proposer’s own products. dOSPO and OMF expired one epoch later on 2.4%, the lowest DRep share of the seven decided here.

Daedalus asked for ₳1.8M, the smallest of the six amounts, took 77.1% and six committee votes, and was enacted at the boundary to epoch 647. TriangleForces, one of the yes votes, wrote that the SecondFi hack shows why a wallet that runs its own node without outside services matters.

Fewer voters, more concentrated power

The count of DReps that cast at least one vote in the previous twelve epochs fell from 313 at epoch 647 to 302 at epoch 649. The total delegated to DReps barely moved, from ₳5.27B to ₳5.28B, but the ten largest DReps held 49.9% of it at epoch 646 and 51.6% at epoch 649.