The Cardano treasury pays out ₳120M and falls to its lowest level since epoch 508

₳120M leaves the treasury

The withdrawal for Cardano PRIME, a twelve month programme for decentralised finance on Cardano, was paid at the boundary to epoch 650. At ₳120M it is the largest single treasury withdrawal under on-chain governance, ahead of the ₳96.8M paid in epoch 575. The balance fell with it, from ₳1,453.7M at the start of epoch 649 to ₳1,337.4M at the start of epoch 650. The vote on PRIME, and the ₳150M raise of the spending limit that made room for it, are in the review of epochs 647 to 649.

After the payment, ₳42.6M remained under the ₳500M spending limit for epochs 613 to 713, according to the treasury overview on this site. Two requests submitted in epoch 649 run past this window: Ikigai’s deposit reimbursement for ₳103,000 and Governance Incentives Framework 2026 for ₳4.2M. A request of PRIME’s size would need another raise of the limit first.

Two votes at their deadline

Update Constitutional Committee 2026 and Reduce minPoolCost to 75 ada and increase Plutus Memory Limits (Part 2) both ran to the boundary to epoch 653. The figures here are as of the close of epoch 652, before either outcome was determined.

The committee election fills the four seats whose terms run out with epoch 653 with the candidates elected in a public vote, each for a term of 146 epochs ending at epoch 799, the longest the parameter allows. That maximum is why, as the proposal itself explains, the action could only take effect in the final epoch of its lifetime: the term is measured from the epoch it takes effect, and an earlier start would have made each term longer than the limit. Two of the four are re-elected members whose new terms begin where their current ones end.

It stood at 72.0% of DRep power against the 67% it needs, and at 56.2% of pool stake against 51%, on 302 yes votes from pools, 1 no and 35 abstentions. DRep shares in this edition are the yes power as a share of all counted power, with abstaining power left out and power that did not vote counted as no. Pool shares are by stake rather than by vote count.

The yes votes carry reservations. The Cardano Foundation wrote that the roster “does not completely reflect our initial preferences” and that it finds the composition adequate for continuity. CardanoYoda (MANDA Pool) voted yes and wrote that 38 DReps holding ₳2.332B took part in the election, that fourth place was decided by about ₳146M, and that approval voting lets a large DRep back several candidates with its full power. The committee minimum was cut from seven to five in the review of epochs 642 to 646 for a related reason: few candidates for an unpaid seat.

The pool fee cut lacks enough pool support

The fee change bundles two things. It cuts the minimum fee every stake pool must charge from 170 ada per epoch to 75, about 56% lower, and it completes a memory increase for Plutus, from 16,500,000 to 17,500,000 units per transaction and from 72,000,000 to 77,500,000 per block.

It stood at 68.6% of DRep power and at 34.5% of pool stake, on 147 yes votes from pools, 59 no and 41 abstentions. The committee voted on it as well, five yes and none against.

YUTA, a pool operator as well as a DRep, wrote that the cut is “if anything likely to work against my own pool income” and voted yes. The Cardano Foundation put the case in figures: with rewards near 300 ada per block, the 170 ada floor absorbs about 57% of the gross reward of a pool producing one block. SASA_nagamaru voted yes and asked that changes of a different nature be submitted separately in future.

Yoroi and EMURGO change position

Yoroi W₳llet at ₳480.0M and EMURGO at ₳305.5M, the largest and the fourth largest DReps at the end of the window, had abstained on every treasury vote but PRIME in the previous window, in rationales of their own that pointed to the unresolved situation at SecondFi. On the committee election and the fee change both voted yes, and both rationales open with a change of position. Yoroi wrote that it had previously abstained “while considering the responsibility entrusted to us by our delegators” and was changing its vote because the committee has to remain operational. EMURGO wrote that it had withheld judgment “in light of the ongoing situation in the ecosystem” and was changing its vote for the continuity of the committee.

On the naming vote both abstained again, with the earlier text. Abstaining power on the committee election was ₳51.8M and on the fee change ₳23.7M, against ₳1.43B on the naming vote. Blockdaemon at ₳338.7M, the third largest, did not vote on either of the two actions closing at the boundary and abstained on the other two, with no rationale in the record.

On 3 August EMURGO had announced on X, for itself and the Yoroi DRep, its intention to deregister as a DRep in due course, to concentrate on the recovery of users affected by a security incident at SecondFi. A wallet migration will undelegate their users, who will then choose a new DRep or hold power that no longer votes.

The committee objects to the format of the naming proposal

One vote closed inside the window, at the boundary to epoch 651. Name the Protocol Version 12 hard fork “von Bergen“ is an info action, which the ledger neither ratifies nor executes, proposing that the next protocol upgrade carry the name of a community member, stake pool operator and ambassador from the earliest days of the network who died in January 2026. DReps put 61.3% of their power behind it on 125 yes votes, 2 no and 23 abstain, pools 9.0% of stake on 34 yes votes. In the committee no member voted yes, three voted no and one abstained.

The committee’s no is about the document, not the tribute. Ace Alliance wrote that its finding “concerns format only, not the merits of the commemoration”: the constitution asks for an action document at an immutable address, and this one sits at an ordinary web address whose content can change. A second member’s no rests on the same point. Tingvard abstained, writing that an info action with no on chain effect is neither constitutional nor unconstitutional, and signalled support for the sentiment. YUTA wrote that it would “rather not turn this into a contest” between late contributors and votes yes on naming actions as a rule. One pool operator abstained, writing that the action arrived in the week the hard fork working group was discussing how to honour several community members who had died. A resubmission would have to fix the mutable reference and the format problems the no rationales cite.

Fewer voters, less power

The power delegated to DReps fell from ₳5.26B at epoch 650 to ₳5.13B at epoch 652, a drop of ₳122.9M, and the count of DReps that voted in the previous twelve epochs stood at 292, against 342 at epoch 643.