Cardano proposal to lower the minimum pool fee to 75 ada expires at 44.2% DRep support

Yes votes carry ₳1.64B on the fee cut, no votes ₳539.5M

The fee cut expired at the start of epoch 661. It would have lowered the minimum fee a stake pool must charge from 170 ada to 75 and changed nothing else. It drew 87 yes votes, 37 no and 19 abstain.

The yes votes outweighed the no votes, but the yes side held 44.2%, because power that did not vote counts as no.

Five of the seven committee members voted yes, meeting the two-thirds requirement, and pool approval is not required, so the DRep side alone kept the cut from taking effect. For pools and their delegators the minimum fee stayed at 170 ada.

The fee and Plutus memory bundle had 34.7% of pool stake

Reduce minPoolCost to 75 ada and increase Plutus Memory Limits (Part 2) carried the same cut together with higher Plutus memory limits and expired at the start of epoch 653. It had 68.6% of DRep power, above the 67% the DReps needed, and 34.7% of pool stake, below the 51% the pools needed. Pools had a vote on it because of the memory limits, a vote they do not have on the fee alone. Yes votes on the bundle carried ₳3.50B of DRep power.

YUTA and SIPO abstain on the fee cut

YUTA, the largest DRep, wrote that its own honest view is yes. What changed its judgment, YUTA wrote, was how pools had voted on the bundle: 59 of the 247 pools that voted on it voted no, and it read the default no of the pools that did not vote as “broad, silent opposition from operators on the ground”. With the cut standing alone, YUTA wrote, pools have no vote “and that opposition has no path into the tally”. It would consider yes on a proposal with a mitigation pools can accept, such as pairing it with a minimum margin. The fee proposal’s document describes that parameter as one that scales with pool rewards instead of a fixed fee.

SIPO called its abstention constructive. It wrote that after the bundle it looked at what the 2023 cut from 340 ada to 170 achieved, citing an Input Output Research report that finds 340 ada still the most common fee at every pool size. On a model with average block rewards of epoch 653 and a zero margin, SIPO wrote, a further cut materially changes delegator returns only for pools of roughly ₳0.5M to ₳3M, which hold about 2.2% of active stake.

SIPO also wrote that the cut comes before a minimum margin exists, and warned that a later reversal would not force pools that had lowered their fee to raise it again. SIPO wrote that its own pools declare 340 ada and that it would vote yes on a cut paired with a minimum margin.

Yoroi W₳llet and EMURGO abstained as well, both citing “the current situation”, as on the OpenZeppelin request. On 3 August EMURGO had announced that it would de-register its DReps in due course, to direct its resources to users affected by the security incident at SecondFi, the wallet service that replaced EMURGO’s Yoroi wallet.

Blockdaemon and the Eternl DRep Committee did not vote, so their power counted as no.

The Cardano Foundation voted yes, as it had on the bundle, writing that it sees “no change in circumstances that would warrant a different position”. Sebastien Guillemot セバ voted yes and wrote that a minimum margin is the end goal and the cut is fine “as long as it’s seen as a step towards that goal”. CryptoCrow and Everstake also voted yes.

SASA_nagamaru_ながまる voted no, writing that 75 ada is not sufficient to support sustainable pool operations and that a lower floor may increase competitive pressure on operators to reduce fees further.

The OpenZeppelin request for ₳11.8M expires at 4.0%

The OpenZeppelin request expired at the start of epoch 661 with 4.0% of DRep power, on 16 yes votes, 94 no and 17 abstain. It asked for ₳11,787,063 for 12 months of work administered by Intersect: three reference implementations, an audited contracts library for Cardano and a security retainer. Five of the seven committee members found it constitutional.

YUTA voted no, writing that the core deliverable duplicates the IO Developer Experience Initiative, already funded with ₳3,601,926, which promises “an OpenZeppelin-style collection of ready-to-use smart contracts”. The Cardano Foundation voted no, objecting to “this proposal’s scope, structure, and price”. SIPO voted no and invited “a coordinated, narrower resubmission”. Of the ten largest DReps, five voted no and none yes.

Toto Finance, Trivolve Tech and Fairway ask for ₳32.5M

The copper reserve, submitted in epoch 661, asks ₳22.0M for Toto Finance to buy copper with ₳14,724,409 of it, tokenize it, hold it for 18 to 24 months, then sell it and return the net proceeds and unused budget to the treasury by month 36. Voting on it runs until the start of epoch 668.

PFMS asks ₳9.6M over 15 months for Trivolve Tech to build an evidence management system for police forces, with its first deployment planned for the Indian state of Telangana and the Cardano Foundation as administrator. It was submitted in epoch 662, and voting on it runs until the start of epoch 669.

AURORA asks ₳940,000 for about five months of work by Fairway on shared infrastructure for finding, comparing and verifying credit opportunities across Cardano lending implementations. It was submitted in epoch 662 as well, with the same voting deadline.

No withdrawal was paid in these epochs. At the end of epoch 662, ₳457.4M of the ₳500M spending limit for epochs 613 to 713 had been paid out in 30 withdrawals and ₳42.6M remained, enough for all three.

By the close of epoch 662, YUTA, CryptoCrow and SASA_nagamaru_ながまる had voted no on the copper reserve. YUTA questioned the cost: only ₳14.7M of the ₳22M would buy copper, and by YUTA’s reading copper must rise about 49% to return the principal. The proposal’s own break-even illustration gives that rise only if all cost ceilings are used and the ada to dollar rate stays unchanged, and unused or unearned budget goes back to the treasury. Dori voted no, writing that the copper tokens are minted on Ethereum and only a bridged representation circulates on Cardano.

hix_coffeepool☕️ voted no on the copper reserve and on AURORA, writing that it votes no on every treasury withdrawal until total withdrawals are back within a sustainable limit, which it puts at roughly 15% of the previous year’s staking rewards, about ₳82M.

In the committee, Tingvard had voted no on the copper reserve and on AURORA and yes on PFMS.

The k poll at close: 2.2% of pool stake voting yes

The k poll asks pools whether there is enough support to propose raising k, the target number of fully saturated pools, from 500 to 1000. Its voting ran until the start of epoch 663. As of the close of epoch 662, 26 pools had voted yes, 48 no and 1 abstain, and 2.2% of pool stake had voted yes. The poll’s document takes yes votes from more than 50% of active pool stake as the measure of support, so the poll ended short of the standard it set for a mandate from pools.

Among DReps, whose votes the document leaves out of that measure, 44 voted yes, 38 no and 49 abstain. Army of Spies voted yes, writing that it supports “this increased decentralization of Cardano stake pools”.

The three new requests on 23 October, after these epochs

A snapshot taken on 23 October, early in epoch 663, had the copper reserve at 0.3% of DRep power, AURORA at 0.4% and PFMS at 3.0%. Ace Alliance and Tingvard had found the copper reserve and AURORA unconstitutional. Tingvard’s yes was the only committee vote on PFMS.

DReps voting in the last 12 epochs fall to 213

At epoch 662, 213 DReps had voted at least once in the last 12 epochs, down from 228 at epoch 659 and the fewest since epoch 537 (January 2025). DReps holding delegated power without such a vote rose to 643.

Over these epochs voters cast 244 votes across DReps, pools and the committee. The count includes superseded votes, votes a voter later replaced. Final votes came from 98 distinct DReps and 35 pools.

Power delegated to DReps rose ₳81.2M, from ₳5.25B at epoch 660 to ₳5.33B at epoch 662.