Governance Incentives Framework 2026
Discussed in the Governance Review for epochs 653 to 655.
131 DReps voted · 63 with a rationale · 2 changed their vote
Open a row to read the rationale.
Changed votes: 2 to no, together voting with 460.7 ₳ of voting power.
Voting concentration
6 of 131 DReps cast half of the voted power.
Largest voter 13.3%, top 5 combined 49.5% of 3.4B ₳ voted.
The 22 largest voters together held as much voting power as the 67.0% threshold required in yes votes.
- No205.6K ₳Rationale
Vote: NO
I am voting NO on the Governance Incentives Framework 2026 proposal in its current form.
I want to be clear that I am not opposed to the underlying objective of this proposal. Cardano governance needs sustainable participation, and the questions surrounding DRep engagement, voter participation, concentration of voting power, and the long-term sustainability of governance actors are important ones.
I also believe there is value in researching whether carefully designed incentives could improve governance participation without undermining decentralization.
My concern is with the level of specificity provided for the funding request itself.
The proposal requests more than ₳4.2 million from the Cardano Treasury to research, model, test, and pilot potential governance incentive mechanisms. I understand that the purpose of this work is to determine what an effective incentive framework might ultimately look like. I therefore do not expect the proposers to already know the final reward formula or permanent compensation model before the research is completed.
However, there is an important distinction between leaving the final research outcome open and leaving the structure of the funded experiment insufficiently defined.
Before authorizing a Treasury withdrawal of this size, I believe DReps and ADA holders should have greater clarity regarding how the funded pilot will operate, how Treasury funds will be controlled, and what safeguards will govern the experiment.
In particular, I would like to see clearer answers to several questions.
How will participants in the real-ADA incentive pilot be selected?
What eligibility requirements will apply?
How much of the overall Treasury request is specifically intended for incentive distribution, and how much is allocated to research, administration, development, community engagement, data collection, and other expenses?
How will ADA used in the pilot be distributed among participants?
What limits or caps will be placed on individual distributions?
Who will have authority over those distributions, and what oversight will exist over that process?
What safeguards will prevent conflicts of interest between the parties designing, administering, evaluating, and potentially benefiting from the incentive system?
What mechanisms will be used to prevent gaming, superficial participation, vote farming, or behavior designed primarily to maximize rewards rather than improve governance quality?
How will the pilot avoid reinforcing the very concentration of voting power that the proposal identifies as a concern?
What objective criteria will determine whether the pilot is successful, unsuccessful, or produces mixed results?
What conditions would cause the experiment to be modified, paused, or terminated?
What happens to ADA that is budgeted but ultimately not required?
How will expenditures and distributions be reported to the community throughout the project?
These questions matter because incentive systems can change behavior in ways that are difficult to reverse once financial expectations become established.
Cardano should be especially careful when introducing monetary incentives into governance. Poorly designed incentives could encourage participation in quantity while reducing participation in quality. They could reward activity rather than judgment, create new opportunities for gaming, advantage already dominant governance actors, or unintentionally encourage further concentration of delegated voting power.
The proposal itself recognizes many of these risks, which is one reason I believe the subject deserves serious research.
But recognizing those risks also strengthens the argument for clearly defining the boundaries and safeguards of the experiment before Treasury funds are approved.
A research proposal does not need to predetermine its conclusions. It should, however, clearly define the experiment being funded.
For a Treasury withdrawal exceeding four million ADA, I believe the community should be able to understand with reasonable precision what is being purchased, how funds will be deployed, what financial controls will apply, how success will be measured, and how the community will be protected if the experiment produces unintended consequences.
At this stage, I do not believe the proposal provides enough clarity in those areas for me to responsibly support the withdrawal.
This should not be interpreted as opposition to governance incentives themselves.
I am open to the possibility that governance incentives could eventually play a useful role in Cardano. Meaningful governance participation requires time, research, analysis, communication, and accountability, and there is a legitimate discussion to be had about whether those contributions should be compensated.
But supporting the research question does not automatically mean supporting every funding structure proposed to investigate it.
Treasury governance requires us to evaluate not only whether an idea has merit, but whether the specific request before us is sufficiently defined, accountable, and proportionate.
My responsibility as a DRep is not simply to determine whether I like the intended outcome. It is also to determine whether I can reasonably explain to my delegators what their Treasury is funding and what protections exist around that expenditure.
In this case, I do not yet believe I can do that with sufficient confidence.
For those reasons, I am voting NO in its current form.
I would be willing to reconsider a revised proposal that provides greater detail regarding the pilot design, participant selection, distribution mechanics, spending controls, oversight, conflict-of-interest protections, anti-gaming safeguards, measurable success criteria, reporting requirements, and treatment of unused Treasury funds.
Governance experimentation can be valuable, and Cardano should continue exploring ways to improve participation and decentralization.
But experimentation funded by the Treasury should have clearly defined boundaries and accountability from the beginning.
Before committing more than ₳4.2 million, I believe we should understand not only why this research is worth pursuing, but also how the experiment will be conducted, how Treasury ADA will be controlled, who may receive it, under what conditions, and with what safeguards.
Until those questions are answered more clearly, I can't responsibly support this Treasury withdrawal.
- No189.9K ₳No rationale
- No186K ₳No rationale
- Yes166.5K ₳Rationale
I am voting Yes because I believe Cardano should investigate sustainable ways to compensate the people who put meaningful time and effort into decentralized governance. I am casting this vote with the assumption that, as a relatively small DRep, I may receive nothing from the proposed pilot under its current middle-out design. My support therefore isn't based on an expectation of personal compensation.
I do hope the pilot remains responsive to the data and community feedback it generates. A compensation model intended to support decentralized governance should ultimately provide a realistic path for active smaller DReps to participate as well, rather than concentrating rewards among a relatively narrow band of already-established representatives.
The purpose of a pilot is to test assumptions against actual behavior. If the evidence shows that the initial eligibility thresholds exclude too many active smaller DReps, I would hope those findings inform the final framework and whatever incentive mechanism is subsequently brought back to governance for approval.
For now, I support funding the research and controlled experiment because Cardano needs evidence about what works before committing the Treasury to a permanent DRep compensation system.
- No160.8K ₳No rationale
- No157.5K ₳Rationale unavailable
- No150.8K ₳Rationale
Core tech and governance process matter, but they are not Cardano’s primary growth bottleneck. The ecosystem stalls on adoption, liquidity, developer experience, and compelling use cases.
- Treasury runway is shrinking rapidly and must be protected. The 350M ADA 2026-27 NCL already risks ~21% drawdown. Aggressive prior spending + ADA weakness demands selectivity to avoid depletion before real adoption.
- Infrastructure is important, but it is not the primary bottleneck. Cardano's core tech is solid. The ecosystem stalls on adoption, liquidity, developer experience, and compelling use cases (DeFi, RWAs, revenue-generating apps). Broad infrastructure funding without adoption KPIs won't drive organic ADA demand.
- Hoskinson's concerns deserve respect, but governance requires balance. Core maintenance matters for competitiveness. DRep duty is long-term sustainability: not unlimited spending. Past allocations often failed to yield proportional TVL/users/ADA utility. Prioritize evidence-based proposals.
- Better capital allocation strategy: Favor high-leverage use-case initiatives, especially RWAs and revenue generating applications that commit to direct revenue or ADA return mechanisms back to the treasury, with clear milestones, private co-funding, and proven traction. Target specific tech unlocks only when tightly tied to measurable adoption impact. This builds real value without creating dependency.
- No143K ₳No rationale
- No140.2K ₳Rationale
Governance Incentives Framework — Voting Rationale
Governance Voting Rationale GAID gov_action174l...67pvcp Title Governance Incentives Framework Type of GA Treasury Withdrawal Amount ₳4,207,967 Date submitted Epoch 649 (Aug 14, 2026, 18:47 UTC) Expiration Date Epoch 656 (Sep 16, 2026)
Contents
- 1.0 Introduction
- 1.1 Summary
- 1.2 Description of Governance Action
- 2.0 Discussion
- 2.1 Method
- 2.2 What this proposal gets right, stated properly
- 2.3 The number being studied is currently manufactured
- 2.4 The pilot is scheduled across the change that moves its population
- 2.5 A mechanism chosen before the method that was supposed to choose it
- 2.6 Success criteria that cannot fail, and the missing quality term
- 2.7 Who authors the measure
- 2.8 What the commons retains
- 2.9 Why this is a No and not an abstention — and my own interest, declared
- 2.10 Fiduciary verification (external instrument)
- 2.11 What would make this a Yes
- 2.12 What the vote does not reach
- 3.0 Conclusion
- Appendix: Published Sort and Instrument Record
1.0 Introduction
1.1 Summary
We are voting NO (remediable) on the Governance Incentives Framework, and the shape of that No matters more than the token, because almost everything this proposal says about the problem is correct.
The incentive deficit is real. Active DRep numbers fell in every twelve-epoch period of the first year of on-chain governance; a hundred-plus proposals now arrive against a couple of hundred active voters, unpaid; a Constitutional Committee consortium retired for want of compensation. Refusing compensation in principle is not a neutral position, and this rationale does not take it. Sustained uncompensated labour in a relationship that participants already read as asymmetric does not stay a gift — it hardens into a role, expected rather than owed, and that entrenchment is its own harm and a quieter one than overspending. The people behind this proposal identified that problem early, wrote it up as a problem statement rather than jumping to a mechanism, and have done the unglamorous work of cataloguing forty-nine separate efforts so the ecosystem can stop duplicating itself. That is real contribution and this DRep wants it to continue.
The No rests on three findings, and all three are properties of this action rather than of the people proposing it. First, the central measurement the project is denominated in – delegated stake, and the population of registered DReps it is drawn from – is currently produced in part by a protocol condition rather than by anyone's governance intent, and the proposal neither says so nor names the pending change that would separate the two. Second, the controlled pilot is scheduled to launch in months five to six and be evaluated through month eleven, a window that on present expectations straddles that change; a measurement baselined on one population and read out on another is not hard to interpret, it is uninterpretable, and the project's most expensive deliverable would be unrecoverable. Third, the pilot's mechanism is pre-committed at milestone two, ahead of the modelling at milestone four that the proposal says is what selects mechanisms – which inverts the project's own stated ordering, and pays live governance actors under a rule chosen before the evidence, while the project's refinement discretion over that rule is disclosed rather than bounded.
Run independently, the external fiduciary instrument this DRep uses for the capital-allocation axis reaches No on the same structure from the opposite foundation – missing contracting entity, undisclosed disbursement profile, no licence on the assets, continuity promised only for as long as the team maintains the website, and activity counts standing in for outcomes at a request size where none of that is survivable. Two instruments built on unrelated grounds arriving at the same verdict is worth naming as what it is.
None of the three findings needs a different team, and none needs a different problem. Each names its own repair, and the repairs are cheap now and unrecoverable later, which is precisely why they belong in a No rather than in a note attached to a Yes.
1.2 Description of Governance Action
This Treasury Withdrawal requests ₳4,207,967 over twelve months to produce a Governance Incentives Framework: a structured, evidence-led approach to designing, testing and evaluating incentives for Cardano's governance actors. The stated architecture separates evidence from legitimacy — candidate mechanisms are to be researched, modelled and tested first, and only then put to governance for a decision on adoption.
The work runs across seven milestones. Discovery and mapping in months one and two; a preliminary framework, parameter landscape, anti-gaming framework, state-of-the-art evidence review and pilot testing plan in months three and four; data-collection infrastructure and the launch of a controlled pilot in months five and six; incentive modelling and simulation in months seven and eight; a public dashboard and model refinement in months nine and ten; final validation in month eleven; and in month twelve a final report, a submitted Governance Incentives Framework CIP, a governance integration pathway, and a governance action put to DReps seeking approval of the completed framework and its recommended incentive-model pathway.
Budget is presented at workstream level: conceptualization ₳445,000; community engagement ₳366,400; modelling ₳884,000; data engineering and monitoring ₳295,000; website and dashboard ₳253,333; administration and coordination ₳472,000; science and research ₳476,667; pilot ₳333,333; additional costs ₳118,667; contingency ₳437,328; independent audit and oversight ₳126,239. The arithmetic totals correctly to ₳4,207,967; the contingency is twelve per cent of the pre-contingency base and ten point four per cent of the whole, and the audit allocation is three per cent of the total including itself, as stated. Against a ₳350,000,000 net change limit the request is 1.20 per cent, as the proposal says. Unused contingency and pilot funds are to be returned to the treasury, and allocations rendered unnecessary by overlap with Input Output Research's already-funded work are to be returned proportionally.
The pilot is the part that spends real money on live governance behaviour. It applies a "middle-out" mechanism, drawn from a consultant's published process-first reward design, distributing eligible ADA rewards to DReps by script, with parameters, safeguards and eligibility rules refinable before launch and fixed thereafter except for predefined safety or termination conditions.
2.0 Discussion
2.1 Method
Every governance action gets read; not every action earns the same reading. This DRep runs each one first through an intake that assigns depth — how much analysis is owed and which instruments run — before any merits are read and before any standing policy applies. That intake returns a lane, never a verdict. Reading the merits first and then choosing the depth is how depth ends up chosen to fit a conclusion already reached, so the order is held. The token is selected last, under a discipline whose operative question is not whether a vote helps something pass but whether a warrant has been derived to deploy delegated stake against it. The full machinery of the run is published in the appendix, so a reader who disagrees can locate whether the disagreement is about how deeply this was read or about what the reading found — those are different arguments, and only one of them is about the proposal.
This action earned the deepest available reading, and it earned it on grounds worth stating plainly. It is not a wall: a twelve-month funded program that sunsets and returns unspent funds tunes nothing structural. But the failure mode is not reversible by simply declining to renew. Money paid to voters cannot be unpaid, and a measurement series baselined across a protocol change cannot be re-baselined afterwards. And what the project produces — the dataset, the dashboard, the metric definitions, the framework itself — is the lens through which the governance layer would afterwards evaluate every incentive proposal that comes to it. That is the kind of action where a mistake does not merely produce a wrong answer; it produces a wrong instrument, and the wrong instrument keeps working.
2.2 What this proposal gets right, stated properly
The proposal refuses the easiest and most damaging move in this whole space. It says, in its own alignment section, that higher activity or turnout will not be treated as sufficient evidence of success, and that mechanisms will also be assessed for participation quality, reward distribution, concentration, gaming risk and effects on delegators. That is the failure this genre almost always walks into, and this proposal walks around it deliberately. It commits to failure-mode testing against anti-gaming, anti-concentration and budget constraints, to publishing data sources and known limitations rather than only results, and to documenting material stakeholder feedback that it does not adopt along with the reason. It commits to reproducing and evaluating the formal reward-scheme research the ecosystem's own researchers produced, including its behavioural and cost assumptions, and to testing whether those assumptions transfer to a live governance environment — which is the right instinct, and more than most proposals in this category attempt.
It also handles two things that are usually handled badly. Overlap with Input Output Research's already-funded governance-incentives work is acknowledged rather than papered over, with a commitment to coordinate and to return the corresponding allocation where a work package becomes unnecessary. And unused restricted reserves are returned rather than retained, with proportional return on reduced scope. Those are the marks of people who expect to be checked and have decided to make checking easy.
The work behind it is real. The problem statement came before the mechanism, which is the correct order and an unusual discipline. The landscape map is a genuine public service; the ecosystem is materially better off for having forty-nine efforts catalogued in one place than it was for having them scattered. This DRep has read that map and has drawn on it, including in the analysis below.
2.3 The number being studied is currently manufactured
Here is the finding the rest of this rationale hangs from, and it is not a criticism of anyone's care.
Nearly every mechanism in the landscape — and nearly every metric this project proposes to collect, model and dashboard — is denominated either in delegated stake or in counts of registered and active DReps. Both of those numbers are currently produced, in unknown proportion, by something other than governance intent. Drawing staking rewards presently requires delegating voting power. So the register does not contain the population of people who wanted to participate in governance; it contains the population of people who wanted their rewards, with the governance-interested subset embedded inside it — and not separable by any refinement of the measurement, because a delegation made from conviction and a delegation made to unlock a withdrawal are byte-identical on chain.
That is not a noisy measurement. It is a measurement whose referent is unresolved, and everything downstream inherits it: delegation concentration, the Gini figure the proposal quotes, participation rates, active-DRep trend lines, and every reward formula denominated in any of them. The proposal opens by citing the DRep Gini rising from 0.92 to 0.94 and eleven to sixteen DReps holding half of voting power. Those figures are load-bearing in its motivation section, and they are measured over a register that is partly compelled.
The pending change that would unmix this is CIP-0181, which removes the delegation requirement for reward withdrawal. It does not appear in the landscape map. Neither does the reward-withdrawal condition itself, under any heading. This DRep does not read that as a failing of the people who compiled the map — CIP-0181 reads as a staking-rewards change rather than an incentives one, and falls outside the map's scope by construction. But the effect is that the map is thorough about mechanisms and silent about the one pending change that alters what its central variable means. A framework built on that map inherits the silence.
What is owed here is not a new opinion. It is a declaration. Before any of this is assessable, the project should state what population each of its measurements is denominated in, and say out loud that the population is currently produced in part by a ledger condition rather than by anyone's choice. That single paragraph, written into the framework at milestone two, changes what every later number means and costs nothing to write.
2.4 The pilot is scheduled across the change that moves its population
The sequencing consequence is sharper than the framing one, and it is the finding that makes this a No rather than a Yes with a note.
The proposal launches its controlled pilot in months five to six, applies a finalised specification, and evaluates it through final validation in month eleven, with findings published at month twelve. If the delegation requirement is removed during that window — and it presently looks likely to land in the next hard fork — then the population the pilot was baselined on and the population it is read out on are not the same population. Registered stake will fall, possibly sharply. Every metric time series breaks at the fork and no analysis spans it. A pilot straddling that break does not become harder to interpret; it becomes uninterpretable, because the thing that changed underneath the measurement is the measurement's own denominator.
This is a scheduling problem, and scheduling problems are cheap to solve in advance and impossible to solve afterwards. ₳333,333 of pilot funding and a good deal of the ₳884,000 modelling allocation would be spent on a result that cannot be defended against the obvious objection, and no later analysis recovers it. There is a second and worse version of the same problem: if a compensation pilot, a decoupling change and any concentration intervention all land in overlapping windows, the register moves for three reasons at once and the ecosystem permanently loses the ability to attribute any of the movement to any of the causes. That would cost more than this proposal's budget, and it would cost it in a currency the treasury cannot replace.
There is also a moment worth naming in advance, because it is the moment where the error becomes most attractive. When the register settles and registered stake falls, that fall will be the instrument beginning to work rather than a crisis — and it will arrive at exactly the point where a mechanism designed to push the number back up looks most compelling. A project holding both the dashboard and the pilot at that moment is the project best placed to read the fall correctly and also the one most exposed to reading it as a problem it is funded to solve. Stating the expectation in advance is what protects against it, and the proposal does not state it.
The repair is small. Sequence the pilot behind the sensing change, or, if the project judges the timing unknowable, pre-register in advance how a break in the series will be handled and accept publicly that no series spans it. Either is a paragraph in the milestone-two pilot plan. Neither is available once the money has moved.
2.5 A mechanism chosen before the method that was supposed to choose it
The proposal's central promise is an ordering: evidence first, governance second, mechanisms evaluated before any is adopted. That promise is what distinguishes it from the dozen proposals that simply advocate a scheme. The milestone structure does not keep it.
The pilot's basis is fixed at milestone two, where the acceptance criterion is a completed pilot testing plan "with the intended middle-out basis" documented. The pilot launches at milestone three, in months five to six. The incentive modelling and simulation that the proposal describes as the process by which candidate mechanisms are designed and tested happens at milestone four, in months seven and eight. So the one mechanism that will actually pay live governance actors real ADA is selected two milestones before the machinery that exists to select mechanisms runs. The proposal is careful to say the pilot does not prejudge the final model selection, and this DRep accepts that entirely as a statement of intent. But the ordering is the structure, and the structure says the first mechanism tested in production was chosen by something other than the project's own published method.
The mechanism chosen is the one published by a consultant and research contributor to this proposal. That is not a wrongdoing finding and this rationale makes none; it is ordinary and often good that the person who designed something is the person brought in to test it. It is, however, an interest that should be disclosed on the face of the proposal and is not, and it interacts with the ordering above in a way that neither would produce alone: the project's own published criteria are not what put that mechanism into production, and the project's own team authored it.
The discretion around it compounds this. Before launch, "parameters, safeguards, eligibility rules, and implementation details may be refined," with material changes documented publicly. Publishing a change is not the same as being bounded by a limit. A rule that pays voters, whose parameters the funded party may revise up until the moment it goes live, with disclosure as the only constraint, is an open discretion that has been disclosed rather than a scoped one — and disclosure of an open discretion answers the question "is it known?" while leaving "is it limited?" untouched. The repair is to fix the specification and the eligibility rules before funds are approved, or to bind refinement to a published change-control with someone outside the project able to object and be answered.
2.6 Success criteria that cannot fail, and the missing quality term
Several of the proposal's stated success measures cannot register a failure, and at this request size that matters.
"Parameter validation: 100% of parameters are available" is satisfied by the parameters existing. "Developer Feedback: positive feasibility assessment" specifies its own required outcome, which means it is not a test. "Simulation Scenarios: 50+", "Public Workshops held: 10+", "Amount of meaningful Dashboards created: 5+", "Page Load Speed: <3 seconds" and "12 monthly public project updates" are counts of activity performed. They are all honest numbers and most of them are useful project-management targets, but they are not evidence about whether governance incentives work, and none of them could come out badly in a way that would tell the ecosystem something it needed to know.
Behind this sits the deeper absence. Nothing in the metric set can register a governance-quality failure. That is not a local oversight; it is the hard constraint this whole field runs into, and the proposal deserves credit for not pretending otherwise. The chain cannot verify, after the fact, whether anyone judged well. So every scheme must pay for a proxy, and the only real design question is which proxy and who is able to produce it. But a framework with no quality term at all has a determinable optimum, and the way to find it is to ask what maximises its metrics at minimum effort. If the answer is a farm, the framework is incomplete however rigorous the rest of it is. This is the failure that has already caught the process-first critique from the other side: correctly refusing a reified binary outcome measure and then optimising three activity variables with no quality term, under which a couple of hundred credentials auto-abstaining is the global optimum.
What is owed is a named falsifier, fixed in advance, in a variable the intervention does not deform — and, alongside it, an answer to the question the proposal never puts to itself: what result would cause this project to recommend against compensation, or against the mechanism it pilots? A program that cannot generate disconfirming evidence about its own subject cannot later be argued out of the ecosystem, and a knob that cannot be turned back is a wall.
The related absence is easier to fix and almost as consequential. Every one of the forty-nine catalogued efforts is a payment scheme. If the problem is that DReps are burning out reading a hundred proposals, then subsidising the burden and reducing it are both answers, and only one of them is represented anywhere in the landscape. A framework claiming to determine which governance problems are actually incentive-related ought to carry a category for the answer that costs the treasury least.
2.7 Who authors the measure
Two of the six rights this framework reads are engaged here in a way worth stating without the machinery.
The first concerns the honesty of the measuring instrument. This project would not merely observe governance; it would define the parameters, the categories of valued contribution, the reliability standards and the dashboard through which governance health is subsequently read — and it says so, accurately, as its central deliverable. That is a proxy being installed as an operative definition, and once a payment is attached to a proxy the proxy stops merely measuring value and starts constituting it. The proposal disclaims the drift honestly at the level of turnout. It binds itself to nothing that would detect the drift, and there is no route by which a participant whose standing the new measure will shape can contest, appeal or reverse it short of the single up-or-down governance action at month twelve, after the framework is built and the pilot has run.
The second concerns who is answerable to whom. The parties proposing to build the framework are the working group whose mapping document establishes the need, the authors of the problem statement cited as motivation, and — for the pilot — the author of the mechanism selected. Each of those is legitimate on its own; taken together they describe a body that authors the yardstick, applies it, evaluates the result, and reports the evaluation, with feedback incorporated "or addressed with rationale" at its own discretion. The financial audit allocation is real and welcome, but it audits money rather than method, and the ₳126,239 buys no independent verification of the pilot's findings or of the metric definitions.
Held against the standard this DRep applies to every field that exercises authority over participants — is power matched by accountability running the same direction — the reading is a partial inversion on both counts, and it fails on the same prong in both cases. The discretion is real, it is disclosed, and it is not limited. That failure names its own cure and the cure is not expensive: scope the discretion, and put a correction path in the design. An external evaluator of the pilot's findings, a published change-control with standing to object, and a defined remit for the parameter work would answer it.
2.8 What the commons retains
The treasury may fund the maintenance of commons relations; it may not fund the transfer of a private surplus. That is a test of claim structure rather than of who the recipients are, and this proposal does substantially better on it than the size of the ask might lead a reader to expect. There is no performance fee, no captured customer relationship, no token, no retained exclusivity. What is being bought is labour, at workstream rates, for a research program whose outputs are intended to be public — which is service compensation, and service compensation is the legitimate category.
The relational half of the value claim is genuinely present and should be credited: reusable datasets, pipelines, metric definitions and dashboard components that lower the setup cost of every later piece of governance research; a shared map that reduces duplicated effort across forty-nine initiatives; and decision-uncertainty reduced before permanent mechanisms are adopted. Those are coordination capacity, stated as coordination capacity.
What is missing is the part that makes the retention real. No licence is named anywhere — not for the dataset, not for the pipelines, not for the dashboard, not for the pilot script. Archival is promised "while website is maintained by us," which is the opposite of a commons asset: it is a service the ecosystem would depend on and does not hold. There is no handover path, no second maintainer, no repository or registry that survives the team. At this request size, a public good that exists at the pleasure of its builder has not yet been transferred to the public, and the framework's own question — what capacity does the commons retain, and how would its degradation be recognised — does not currently have an answer beyond the team's continued goodwill. That goodwill is not in doubt. Its durability is not a thing the treasury should have to rely on.
2.9 Why this is a No and not an abstention
Three of this framework's grounds for abstention were live and each is foreclosed, so the reasoning is set out rather than asserted.
The first is that the ballot cannot carry the finding. Much of the deepest analysis in this space genuinely cannot be reached by this vote: the formal negative result on proportional reward sharing, the impossibility result on saturation caps, the argument that pricing an unpriced trust signal destroys the property that made it worth using, the criterion that sorts funding sources by direction and live exit. Those are findings about mechanisms, not about this action, and they are recorded below as trajectory rather than converted into the token. But the three findings that carry this No — the undeclared denominator, the pilot's scheduling, and the mechanism chosen ahead of the method — are properties of this action, stated on its own face, and fixable in it. Where the ballot reaches the finding, the ballot is owed the finding.
The second is that the disagreement is a margin dispute about whether a relation is genuinely served. It is not, and this framework carries a specific warning against mistaking rigour for that margin. This proposal is careful, well-organised and methodologically serious, and it would be easy to read that seriousness as good faith contested only at the edges. Care about the method is not evidence about the denominator. The findings here are structural and each names its own repair, which puts them on the other side of the line.
The third is that this DRep should stand aside on grounds of interest, and this one deserves the most care because the interest is real. I am a small DRep. A pilot that pays DReps could pay me. A framework that governs DRep compensation would govern mine. That is not the general interest every participant holds by owning ada or using the chain; it is membership of the class the action pays. Two things nevertheless make standing aside the wrong answer. The interest is universal across the entire electorate — every DRep voting on DRep compensation is inside the paid class, so abstention does not produce a less conflicted decider, it only lowers the bar while the conflict remains. And the direction of my arguments runs against my own financial interest: the positions set out here and in my published work on compensation point away from the schemes that would pay the largest DReps most, and away from paying anyone sooner. I would rather that alignment be declared than discovered, and I would rather it be checked by someone who assumes the interest and reads for it.
There is a fourth consideration that is not an abstention ground but bears on the direction of the token. Withholding stake here would lower the passage bar for a program whose central defect is that it spends before the sequence is right. When the mechanical effect of withholding would assist the very ordering a finding objects to, withholding is not neutral, and neutrality was the only thing abstention was ever for.
The honest token is a No that specifies. And the finding that pulled hardest the other way — the one that came closest to changing this vote — is the one this rationale opened with: non-payment in a relationship participants read as asymmetric is not a safe default, and every month this stays unresolved, the volunteer framing hardens further into a role. That is why the No is remediable, why the specification below is short, and why this DRep would rather see a corrected version of this proposal in the next cycle than see the question go quiet.
2.10 Fiduciary verification (external instrument)
This DRep's own framework reads the relational and structural question and by design does not read the capital-allocation one — price, instrument fit, size-calibrated discipline, upfront exposure, opportunity cost. Leaving that region unexamined would raise vigilance rather than lower it, so the proposal was run through the DRep Treasury Rule Book v17 as a subordinate gate, one that can lower a merits-Yes but cannot raise a merits-No.
By economic substance this is public-good and civic-service work — independent research, governance and standards development, and community coordination — with a subordinate data-engineering component and one workstream, the pilot, that deploys a live payment mechanism rather than studying one. At ₳4,207,967 nominal it classifies very large, which is the band that requires exceptional public return, capped upfront exposure, stress testing and an explicit opportunity-cost case, and the band where a passing score is necessary and nowhere near sufficient.
The gate does not clear, and it fails before the scoring rather than inside it. The proposal does not name a contracting entity, a jurisdiction or a dispute path, which the rulebook requires at this size. It does not state a disbursement profile, tranche logic or upfront exposure, and unstated exposure at very large is treated as material opacity rather than as an open question. No administrator is named for a request of this size. No licence or rights position is stated for any of the assets, and continuity is promised only for as long as the team maintains the website, which fails the continuity and succession test outright. Milestone verification runs substantially through the project's own reporting; the independent allocation is a financial audit, not a verifier of method or findings. And several headline measures are activity counts of exactly the kind the metric-integrity rule exists to refuse. Independently of all that, the additionality question bites hardest: with the formal reward-scheme research already published, a live already-funded research program covering overlapping ground, and forty-nine catalogued efforts, a much smaller staged instrument — a denominator study, a map amendment, and a pre-registered baseline taken after the sensing change — would buy most of the decision-relevant learning at a fraction of the exposure, and the rulebook's own guidance warns specifically against one large master plan where the shared need is still uncertain.
So this is convergence at the conclusion rather than corroboration at a soft spot: two instruments built on unrelated foundations — a rights derivation and a capital-stewardship rulebook — reach No against the same structure, from opposite directions. Had the fiduciary read come back clean, the relational No would have stood unchanged; the gate's function here is to sharpen the resubmission specification, not to supply the verdict.
2.11 What would make this a Yes
The specification is deliberately short, and every item is cheap now.
Declare the denominator. State in the framework which population each measurement is drawn from, and that the register is currently produced in part by the reward-withdrawal condition rather than by governance intent. Add CIP-0181 and that condition to the landscape map, which is the map's own stated purpose.
Sequence the pilot behind the sensing change, or pre-register how a break in the series will be handled and say publicly that no series spans it. Say in advance that registered stake is expected to fall and that the fall is the instrument working.
Scope the discretion. Fix the pilot specification, safeguards and eligibility before funds are approved, or bind refinement to a published change-control with an external party able to object and be answered. Disclosure is not a limit.
Select the piloted mechanism by the project's own published criteria after the modelling milestone rather than before it, and disclose on the face of the proposal the authorship interest in the mechanism currently pre-selected.
Fix falsifiers in advance, in variables the intervention does not deform, and state what finding would cause the project to recommend against compensation or against its own piloted mechanism. Replace the success measures that cannot fail. Carry a quality term, or say plainly that none exists and what follows from that.
Add a cost-reduction category to the framework, so that reducing the deliberative burden sits alongside subsidising it.
And on the allocation side: name the contracting entity, jurisdiction and dispute path; state the disbursement tranching and cap upfront exposure; name a licence for the dataset, pipelines, dashboard and pilot script, with a handover path that does not depend on the team maintaining a website; fund independent verification of method and findings rather than only of money; disclose prior treasury receipts and the conflicts named above; and stage the ask, with a smaller first tranche covering the denominator work and the pre-registered baseline before the full program is committed.
Do those, and this becomes a proposal this DRep would vote for.
2.12 What the vote does not reach
A vote is a snapshot; the log is the trajectory. Several of the strongest findings this reading surfaced are about the mechanisms in the landscape rather than about this action, and converting them into this vote would misrepresent both.
The formal result on proportional reward sharing belongs here first (IOR research paper), because it bears on the mechanism family most likely to be recommended. Modelling DReps who choose how much effort to invest, where effort both raises the chance of a correct vote and attracts delegation, the analysis of the rule that pays each DRep a share of the budget proportional to their share of total delegation finds effort per DRep scaling as one over their number, and the probability of the community selecting the correct outcome tending to one half as the number grows — worse, not better, under concave costs. The authors report being surprised, since proportional sharing is the natural rule and performs well elsewhere; it fails here because a fixed prize pool with many entrants produces under-investment by everyone. The historical precedent usually cited in favour of pay-by-delegated-stake is the same rule. Their preferred alternative, a threshold paying a fixed amount to any DRep attracting at least a defined share, performs far better on effort and is structurally hostile to credential splitting, which is the opposite property to a saturation curve. This proposal already commits to reproducing that work, which is to its credit; the trajectory item is whether the ecosystem's discussion absorbs the result.
Two structural readings sit alongside it. Delegated stake resists gaming largely because nothing pays for it; attaching income to it is the pricing event, after which it becomes an asset with a calculable return and is rational to acquire up to the point where acquisition cost meets expected return — through marketing, delegation incentives or revenue sharing, none of it fraud. The property that makes the metric attractive is the property that paying for it removes. And a saturation cap does not repair this: the impossibility result on sublinear voting power shows that whenever a wallet of any size yields nonzero power, splitting recovers power growing at least linearly in holdings, whatever the splitting, voting or setup costs — so the curve fails to bind on anyone large enough to split and binds only on those too small to bother, which is a regressive incidence rather than a neutral failure. Registering a DRep credential is cheap and carries no pledge, so the discipline stake pools have against splitting does not exist here.
The observed precedent belongs in the log too: in Uniswap's delegate reward program, paid delegates participated strongly while quorum fragility and voting-power concentration remained unresolved. Participation among the compensated population rose; the governance health the participation was supposed to indicate did not follow. That is what it looks like when a payment restores a number without restoring what the number stood in for, and the landscape map contains it already. Anyone familiar with Cardano’s Project Catalyst saw the same thing happen with Community Review: the goal was crowdsourced deliberative capacity to inform the voting, but incentives actually reduced deliberative capacity and introduced gaming and extraction.
One open question in the landscape is higher-leverage than anything else in it, and it is open rather than settled: whether concentration indices become the primary success criteria for an incentive pilot. This proposal, in treating concentration as one of several evaluation dimensions, does better than most; the trajectory risk is that the question gets answered by default in the course of building a dashboard rather than deliberately.
The reading also records something that cuts the other way and should not be buried because it is inconvenient to the token. Compensation functions as a regime-keeping device: uncompensated labour in a relationship perceived as asymmetric converts contributors into role-holders whose giving becomes expected rather than owed, and neither of the ecosystem's two problem statements says so. That is a finding in favour of solving this problem soon, and this DRep carries it as an obligation rather than as a concession.
Finally, two things to watch. The direction-and-exit criterion — whether payment flows from the party the DRep serves, and whether that party holds a live exit — sorts the four candidate funding sources quickly and without requiring agreement on compensation in principle, and this DRep intends to keep arguing for the criterion rather than for a preferred answer. And the sharpest single sensor available: when registered stake falls after decoupling, does the ecosystem read it as the instrument beginning to work, or as a crisis requiring a mechanism to restore the number? That reading will say more about whether participation-as-a-target has been dislodged than any argument made before it.
Two of these are candidates for a future proposal rather than a future vote: the missing cost-reduction category, and a standard requiring any incentive proposal to declare its denominator before it is assessed. This DRep will be monitoring the first, and intends to draft the second.
3.0 Conclusion
We are voting NO (remediable).
The problem this proposal names is real, the people behind it have done real work, and the refusal here is not a refusal of governance compensation, of research into it, or of this team. It is a refusal of this sequence. The project would measure a register that is currently manufactured without saying so; it would run its most expensive experiment across the change that unmakes that register; and it would pay live governance actors under a mechanism selected two milestones before the method meant to select mechanisms, under a discretion that is disclosed rather than bounded. Run separately, the external capital-allocation instrument reaches the same conclusion against the same structure, on missing entity and disbursement terms, an unlicensed public asset, continuity contingent on a website, and success measures that cannot fail.
Each of those is repairable, and the repairs are paragraphs rather than redesigns. A declared denominator, a pilot sequenced behind the sensing change, a mechanism selected by the project's own criteria, falsifiers fixed in advance, a licence and a handover, and a staged first tranche. That is the whole specification, and it is cheap now and unrecoverable after the money moves.
What holds this DRep's posture together is easy to state and this rationale will keep to it: support the problem, contest the sequence, supply the instruments. The problem is real and the need is not in doubt. What is contested is order and proxy, and the constructive half of that is owed rather than optional, which is why the denominator decomposition, the delegator-authored signal family that is buildable today from data already in the ledger, and the missing cost-reduction category are all offered here rather than held back. This DRep would rather help this proposal succeed on resubmission than watch the question go quiet, and will say so publicly to the proposers as well as here.
DRep ID: drep1yfaq8dsam...3nq50q
DRep Profile: https://dreptalk.com/dreps/styg-nq50q/
My thanks to the delegators who make this reading possible, and to the people behind this proposal, whose work on the problem preceded almost everyone else's.
Stay in touch. X: https://x.com/styg50
- 1.0 Introduction
- No124.7K ₳No rationale
- No100.8K ₳No rationale
- No90.7K ₳Rationale
Governance Action Report
1. Introduction
The Governance Incentives Framework is a 12-month Treasury-funded R&D project requesting ₳4,207,967 to create a structured, evidence-based approach for designing, testing, and evaluating governance incentives in Cardano. It responds to declining active DRep participation, increased voting-power concentration, sustainability concerns among governance actors, and the risks created by poorly designed incentive mechanisms.
The project will map existing governance-incentive work, define actor-specific incentive problems, collect governance activity data, develop and simulate incentive models, gather community feedback, and conduct a controlled incentive pilot based on the middle-out mechanism. Public outputs include a governance dataset and dashboard, documented models and formulas, research publications, pilot findings, a Governance Incentives Framework CIP, and a governance integration pathway. Delivery is organized across seven milestones over twelve months, with workstream-level budget allocations, independent audit and oversight, a 12% contingency reserve, and refund conditions for unused restricted funds.
2. Governance Action Analysis
Positive aspects
The definition of the problem presented by the proposal is generally sound. There is a real issue related to the sustainability of governance participation, concentration of power, the difficulty of maintaining qualified participation over time, and the absence of structured mechanisms that allow incentives to be experimented with responsibly. The problem is neither artificial nor something created simply to justify a new expense. There is a legitimate need to advance this discussion and find more organized ways to evaluate which incentives could improve governance without introducing adverse effects, financial dependency, or opportunistic behavior.
It is also positive that the proposer demonstrates knowledge of different existing initiatives related to the topic. This is important because governance incentives are not a new discussion in Cardano. There are research efforts, CIPs, working groups, previous proposals, and different approaches already being discussed. Therefore, any new initiative should start from this accumulated work, identify real gaps, and avoid duplication. The proposal appears aware of this context and attempts to position the project as an initiative for consolidation, analysis, modeling, and experimentation rather than simply another isolated research effort.
Another positive aspect is that the initiative does not directly depend on one of the founding entities. It is healthy for governance research, experimentation, and framework development to emerge from independent ecosystem actors. This contributes to decentralizing not only formal decision-making power, but also the capacity to produce references, methodologies, and proposals for institutional evolution. In a system that intends to mature its decentralized governance, it would not be desirable for all relevant work of this nature to remain necessarily concentrated within the same organizations.
The conceptual structure of the solution is also rational. Incentives are a controversial topic, different governance actors have different interests, and progress in this area has occurred in a relatively disorganized manner. There are frequently individual proposals, parallel discussions, and different models being presented without a clear process for systematically comparing them. In this context, bringing research, data, feedback, modeling, simulation, and experimentation together within a common framework can be a useful way to transform a fragmented discussion into a more structured process.
The main problem is not simply that too much research already exists and that no additional research is necessary. Precisely because there is no consensus and because potential solutions involve important trade-offs, a structured effort to organize evidence, compare mechanisms, and create better conditions for future decisions can be useful. The difficulty lies less in the project’s general objective and more in the relationship between the size of the requested budget and what the proposal actually commits to delivering.
The idea of practical experimentation is also valuable because incentives are particularly difficult to evaluate through theoretical analysis alone. The real behavior of participants may be considerably different from what models predict.
The members presented have a history of participation and contributions within the Cardano ecosystem, and this counts positively. There is no question that accumulated experience and knowledge exist.
Community feedback mechanisms are also included, which is positive.
The proposal is not conceptually distant from something that could be supported. The objection is not to the development of a Governance Incentives Framework, research in this area, or experimentation with mechanisms. This work is important and potentially necessary for the maturation of Cardano governance.
Negative aspects
A particularly weak point is the criterion under which “at least one model or mechanism family” will be documented and simulated. For a twelve-month initiative with a budget exceeding four million ADA and a significant amount of resources dedicated to research, modeling, and analysis, this minimum level of delivery is insufficient. If, after all this work, the result can be only one model or a single family of mechanisms, it would be difficult to consider the investment proportional to the result.
Governance incentives are not a single problem that necessarily requires a single solution. There are different possible objectives: incentivizing consistent participation, improving the quality of representation, reducing concentration, encouraging active delegation, compensating operational costs, increasing participation in discussions, incentivizing accountability, or creating different mechanisms for different categories of actors. These objectives may require completely different mechanisms. A project of this scale should therefore result in multiple comparable models, with different assumptions, costs, risks, advantages, and expected effects.
Comparison between alternatives should be a central part of the delivery. It would be important to observe why a particular model works better for a particular problem, which risks appear in different scenarios, how different mechanisms affect concentration, strategic behavior, or participation, and which solutions would be more appropriate for different governance functions. A single model, or a single family, greatly limits the usefulness of the entire research and simulation process.
For a budget of this size, practical adoption also remains too limited and contingent. There is a real possibility that the project delivers research, models, dashboards, datasets, workshops, a paper, a CIP, and a future proposal, but that in the end no mechanism is actually adopted. In that scenario, significant resources would have been used to increase knowledge and produce references, but another decision process, a new budget, and a new implementation would still be required to generate direct governance impact.
Clearer commitments to concrete and predefined pilots would be preferable, potentially testing more than one class of mechanism where technically feasible. In this way, the project would not only produce hypotheses about incentives but would also generate behavioral evidence that could be used directly in future decisions.
The engagement KPIs are also insufficiently ambitious for an initiative intended to create a governance reference for the entire ecosystem. The number of consulted actors, workshops, and community engagement activities appears relatively limited given the relevance of the topic and the requested budget. A project intended to formulate mechanisms that may eventually affect DReps, SPOs, delegators, Constitutional Committee members, and other participants should seek a sufficiently broad and diverse participation base.
The quality of the KPIs more generally is also a concern. There are many technical indicators related to project execution: system availability, latency, number of simulated scenarios, dashboards, research questions, timeline adherence, and risk management. These indicators can be useful for verifying whether particular outputs have been delivered, but they say relatively little about the most important question: whether the work actually improves Cardano’s capacity to govern.
Metrics more directly connected to governance outcomes are missing. It would be important to measure whether tested mechanisms sustainably increase participation, reduce concentration, increase participant diversity, improve regularity of DRep activity, generate greater delegator participation, or produce any measurable gain in accountability. Adoption of outputs should also be measured: how many mechanisms proceed toward implementation, how many are considered viable, how many receive sufficient support from governance actors, and what results emerge during pilots.
Without metrics of this kind, the project may be formally successful because it delivered dashboards, reports, workshops, and simulations even if governance remains in exactly the same state after twelve months. This could be acceptable for a smaller research project. For a Treasury Withdrawal of this scale, a higher standard is necessary.
For a proposal of this level of importance and budget, the amount of publicly verifiable information presented about the individual track record of those responsible is insufficient. Among the three main members presented, there is little external documentation that allows independent evaluation of professional history, research experience, management of projects of this scale, incentive science, economic analysis, data engineering, or financial execution. Being known within the community or having participated in different initiatives does not completely substitute for this kind of evidence. The larger the budget and the more institutional the scope, the higher the standard of verifiability over execution capability should be.
Practical management also appears concentrated in a very small core. For a project intended to produce a decentralized governance framework, this structure appears excessively centralized. It is not necessary for the entire community to participate directly in management, because this would probably make the process inefficient. However, a more plural organizational architecture would be expected.
Working groups could be responsible for different areas, alongside external researchers, independent methodological reviewers, specialists in mechanism design, data analysis, behavioral economics, or governance research, and representatives of different participant categories. Some type of formal advisory panel with clear responsibilities and criteria could also be created. This would reduce intellectual and operational dependence on a small number of people.
The community appears mainly in a consultation and validation role. The overall design remains relatively top-down: a small core conducts the research, develops the framework and models, and then collects feedback. A more homogeneous structure would be preferable, allowing different parts of the community to participate more directly in constructing framework components, especially considering that the mechanisms developed may eventually affect those same groups.
The budget is probably the principal reason the proposal cannot be supported in its current form. ₳4,207,967 is a very significant request. The size of the budget is not, by itself, a reason for rejection. An important project may justify a high budget. The problem is that the granularity presented does not allow a satisfactory understanding of how this amount was constructed.
Categories such as Conceptualization, Modeling of Incentives, Science & Research, Administration & Coordination, Community Engagement, and Data Engineering receive substantial amounts but remain described at a highly aggregated level. It is not possible to adequately understand how many people will work in each area, how many hours will be dedicated, which rates will be used, which activities will be performed internally or outsourced, how costs were estimated, and how responsibilities will be distributed.
There is also some conceptual overlap between different categories. Conceptualization, Science & Research, and Modeling of Incentives, for example, appear to contain related activities. Similarly, Data Engineering, Website & Dashboard, and parts of Modeling may share technical components. Without a more detailed decomposition, it is difficult to determine whether the amounts are reasonable or whether there is duplication of costs between workstreams.
The existence of a more detailed operational budget maintained separately does not completely solve this problem. If dReps are being asked to authorize the Treasury Withdrawal, the information needed to evaluate the requested amount should be available at the time of the decision. A later audit can verify whether money was used as planned, but it does not substitute for the ability to evaluate beforehand whether the proposed work is appropriately priced.
Nor is it sufficient to justify the amount primarily through comparison with the Net Change Limit. The fact that ₳4.2 million represents a small percentage of the Treasury’s total spending capacity does not demonstrate value for money. The relevant question is not whether the Treasury can pay, but whether this specific set of deliverables justifies this cost.
It would be more convincing to provide cost benchmarks, detailed team composition, expected compensation by role, estimated dedication, suppliers, infrastructure, and costs associated with each milestone. This would allow the budget to be compared with the volume of work and proportionality to be evaluated.
Risks and concerns
The limited practical adoption creates a relevant sunk-cost risk. This does not mean that research without adoption has no value; it clearly can. However, when the budget is this high, a stronger connection between research and applied experimentation is reasonable to expect.
The relatively limited number of governance actors consulted, workshops, and community engagement activities also creates a risk that the framework primarily reflects the views of a small group of more active participants rather than a sufficiently broad and diverse base.
The concentrated execution structure creates intellectual and operational dependency on a small number of people. This concern is particularly relevant because governance incentives are not only a technical issue. They involve normative choices about which behaviors should be rewarded, who can receive compensation, which activities have value, how capture should be avoided, and how participation should be balanced with quality. A framework created by a small number of people, even if later submitted to public consultation, can incorporate relevant assumptions before the community participates in the discussion.
There is also a risk that technical outputs become substitutes for governance outcomes. Dashboards, datasets, workshops, simulations, research questions, timeline adherence, and system availability can demonstrate execution, while leaving unresolved whether the work improves participation, decentralization, accountability, or governance quality.
Budget aggregation also creates uncertainty over proportionality and potential duplication between workstreams. Without greater decomposition, it remains difficult to determine whether values across Conceptualization, Science & Research, Modeling, Data Engineering, Website & Dashboard, and Administration represent distinct work or overlapping costs.
3. Vote and Rationale
Vote: NO
The decision does not represent rejection of the initiative or of the need to develop better governance mechanisms. There is significant merit in the identified problem, in the proposed direction, and in the attempt to structure a discussion that currently remains fragmented.
What prevents a favorable vote is the combination of a high budget, minimally required deliverables that are insufficiently ambitious in some of the most important areas, limited commitments to practical experimentation, KPIs excessively focused on technical outputs, a concentrated execution structure, and a budget that remains too high-level to permit an adequate value-for-money assessment. The current level of commitment to outputs, pilots, measurable impact, plural participation, and budget transparency is not yet proportional to the size of the requested Treasury Withdrawal.
A revised version could resolve much of these concerns without radically changing the original concept. Multiple models or mechanism families should become mandatory deliverables, with structured comparison between alternatives, more concrete and better-defined pilots, KPIs directly connected to observable governance improvements, a more plural organizational structure, and a much more detailed budget decomposition. Greater public documentation of the team’s track record and clearer responsibility for each workstream would also be important. With these changes, a new version could become supportable.
4. Conclusion
The Governance Incentives Framework addresses a legitimate problem and proposes a potentially valuable direction for Cardano governance. The current request, however, does not provide outputs, practical experimentation, measurable governance outcomes, organizational plurality, or budget transparency at a level proportional to ₳4.21 million. The vote is therefore NO in its current form.
Relatório da Ação de Governança
1. Introdução
O Governance Incentives Framework é um projeto de P&D financiado pelo Tesouro, com duração de 12 meses e solicitação de ₳4.207.967, destinado a criar uma abordagem estruturada e baseada em evidências para projetar, testar e avaliar incentivos de governança na Cardano. A iniciativa responde à redução da participação ativa de DReps, ao aumento da concentração de poder de voto, a preocupações sobre a sustentabilidade dos atores de governança e aos riscos criados por mecanismos de incentivo mal desenhados.
O projeto irá mapear trabalhos existentes sobre incentivos de governança, definir problemas de incentivo específicos por tipo de ator, coletar dados de atividade de governança, desenvolver e simular modelos de incentivo, coletar feedback da comunidade e realizar um piloto controlado baseado no mecanismo middle-out. Os outputs públicos incluem dataset e dashboard de governança, documentação de modelos e fórmulas, publicações de pesquisa, resultados do piloto, uma CIP do Governance Incentives Framework e um caminho de integração com a governança. A execução é organizada em sete milestones ao longo de doze meses, com alocações orçamentárias por workstream, auditoria e supervisão independentes, reserva de contingência de 12% e condições de reembolso para recursos restritos não utilizados.
2. Análise da Ação de Governança
Aspectos positivos
Há concordância de forma geral com a definição do problema apresentada pela proposta. Existe uma questão real relacionada à sustentabilidade da participação em governança, à concentração de poder, à dificuldade de manter participação qualificada ao longo do tempo e à ausência de mecanismos estruturados que permitam experimentar incentivos de forma responsável. O problema não é artificial nem algo criado apenas para justificar uma nova despesa. Existe uma necessidade legítima de avançar nessa discussão e de encontrar formas mais organizadas de avaliar quais incentivos poderiam melhorar a governança sem introduzir efeitos adversos, dependência financeira ou comportamento oportunista.
Também é positivo que o proposer demonstre conhecimento sobre diferentes iniciativas já existentes relacionadas ao tema. Esse ponto é importante porque governance incentives não é uma discussão nova em Cardano. Há pesquisas, CIPs, working groups, propostas anteriores e diferentes abordagens já sendo discutidas. Portanto, qualquer nova iniciativa deveria partir desse trabalho acumulado, identificar lacunas reais e evitar duplicação. A proposta parece demonstrar consciência desse contexto e tenta posicionar o projeto como uma iniciativa de consolidação, análise, modelagem e experimentação, e não simplesmente como mais uma pesquisa isolada.
Outro aspecto positivo é o fato de a iniciativa não depender diretamente de uma das entidades fundadoras. É saudável que pesquisa, experimentação e desenvolvimento de frameworks de governança possam surgir de atores independentes do ecossistema. Isso contribui para descentralizar não apenas o poder formal de decisão, mas também a capacidade de produzir referências, metodologias e propostas para evolução institucional. Em um sistema que pretende amadurecer sua governança descentralizada, não seria desejável que todo trabalho relevante dessa natureza permanecesse necessariamente concentrado nas mesmas organizações.
A estrutura conceitual da solução também parece racional. O tema de incentivos é controverso, existem interesses diferentes entre os atores de governança e os avanços nessa área têm ocorrido de forma relativamente desordenada. Frequentemente há propostas individuais, discussões paralelas e modelos diferentes sendo apresentados sem um processo claro que permita compará-los de maneira sistemática. Nesse sentido, reunir pesquisa, dados, feedback, modelagem, simulação e experimentação em um framework comum pode ser uma forma útil de transformar uma discussão fragmentada em um processo mais estruturado.
O problema principal não é simplesmente a existência de pesquisa demais e que nenhuma pesquisa adicional seja necessária. Justamente porque não há consenso e porque as possíveis soluções apresentam trade-offs importantes, é útil que exista um esforço estruturado para organizar evidências, comparar mecanismos e produzir melhores condições para decisões futuras. A dificuldade está menos no objetivo geral do projeto e mais na relação entre o tamanho do orçamento solicitado e aquilo que a proposta efetivamente se compromete a entregar.
A ideia de realizar experimentação prática também é positiva, porque incentivos são particularmente difíceis de avaliar apenas por meio de análise teórica. O comportamento real dos participantes pode ser bastante diferente daquele previsto em modelos.
Os membros citados têm histórico de participação e contribuições dentro do ecossistema Cardano, e isso conta positivamente. Não está sendo questionado que existam experiência e conhecimento acumulados.
A proposta também prevê mecanismos de community feedback, o que é positivo.
A proposta não está conceitualmente distante de algo que poderia ser apoiado. A oposição não é ao desenvolvimento de um Governance Incentives Framework, à realização de pesquisas nessa área ou à experimentação de mecanismos. Esse trabalho é importante e potencialmente necessário para o amadurecimento da governança de Cardano.
Aspectos negativos
Um ponto especialmente fraco é o critério segundo o qual será documentado e simulado “at least one model or mechanism family”. Para uma iniciativa de doze meses, com um orçamento superior a quatro milhões de ADA e uma quantidade significativa de recursos destinada a pesquisa, modelagem e análise, esse nível mínimo de entrega é insuficiente. Se, depois de todo esse trabalho, o resultado puder ser apenas um modelo ou uma única família de mecanismos, seria difícil considerar o investimento proporcional ao resultado.
Governance incentives não é um problema único que exige necessariamente uma única solução. Existem diferentes objetivos possíveis: incentivar participação consistente, melhorar a qualidade da representação, reduzir concentração, estimular delegação ativa, compensar custos operacionais, aumentar participação em discussões, incentivar prestação de contas ou criar mecanismos diferentes para diferentes categorias de atores. Esses objetivos podem exigir mecanismos completamente distintos. Por isso, um trabalho desse porte deveria resultar em múltiplos modelos comparáveis, com diferentes assumptions, custos, riscos, vantagens e efeitos esperados.
A comparação entre alternativas deveria ser parte central da entrega. Seria importante poder observar por que um determinado modelo funciona melhor para determinado problema, quais riscos aparecem em diferentes cenários, como diferentes mecanismos afetam concentração, comportamento estratégico ou participação e quais soluções seriam mais adequadas para diferentes funções dentro da governança. Um único modelo, ou uma única família, limita muito a utilidade de todo o processo de pesquisa e simulação.
Para um orçamento dessa dimensão, a adoção prática também permanece excessivamente limitada e contingente. Existe uma possibilidade real de que o projeto entregue pesquisa, modelos, dashboards, datasets, workshops, um paper, uma CIP e uma proposta futura, mas que ao final nenhum mecanismo seja efetivamente adotado. Nesse cenário, uma quantidade significativa de recursos teria sido utilizada para aumentar conhecimento e produzir referências, mas ainda seria necessário iniciar outro processo de decisão, buscar novo orçamento e executar uma nova implementação para gerar impacto direto sobre a governança.
Seriam preferíveis compromissos mais claros com pilotos concretos e previamente delimitados, possivelmente testando mais de uma classe de mecanismo quando tecnicamente viável. Dessa forma, o projeto não apenas produziria hipóteses sobre incentivos, mas geraria evidências comportamentais que poderiam ser utilizadas diretamente em decisões futuras.
Os KPIs de engajamento também são pouco ambiciosos para uma iniciativa que pretende criar uma referência de governança para todo o ecossistema. O número de atores consultados, workshops e atividades de community engagement parece relativamente limitado diante da relevância do tema e do orçamento solicitado. Um projeto que pretende formular mecanismos que potencialmente afetarão DReps, SPOs, delegators, Constitutional Committee members e outros participantes deveria buscar uma base de participação suficientemente ampla e diversa.
A qualidade dos KPIs em geral também gera preocupação. Existem muitos indicadores técnicos relacionados à execução do projeto: disponibilidade de sistemas, latência, número de cenários simulados, dashboards, research questions, timeline adherence e gerenciamento de riscos. Esses indicadores podem ser úteis para verificar se determinados outputs foram entregues, mas dizem relativamente pouco sobre a questão mais importante: se o trabalho produzido realmente melhora a capacidade de Cardano governar.
Faltam métricas mais diretamente conectadas a outcomes de governança. Seria importante medir se os mecanismos testados aumentam participação de forma sustentável, se reduzem concentração, se aumentam diversidade de participantes, se melhoram a regularidade da atividade de DReps, se geram maior participação de delegators ou se produzem algum ganho mensurável de accountability. Também seria útil medir adoção dos outputs: quantos mecanismos seguem para implementação, quantos são considerados viáveis, quantos recebem suporte suficiente dos atores de governança e quais resultados aparecem durante os pilotos.
Sem métricas desse tipo, existe o risco de o projeto ser formalmente bem-sucedido porque entregou dashboards, relatórios, workshops e simulações, mesmo que a governança continue exatamente no mesmo estado ao final dos doze meses. Para um projeto de pesquisa menor, isso poderia ser aceitável. Para um Treasury Withdrawal dessa escala, é necessário estabelecer um padrão mais alto.
Para uma proposta desse nível de importância e orçamento, é insuficiente a quantidade de informação pública verificável apresentada sobre o track record individual dos responsáveis. Entre os três membros principais apresentados, há pouca documentação externa que permita avaliar de forma independente o histórico profissional, experiência em pesquisa, gerenciamento de projetos dessa escala, ciência de incentivos, análise econômica, data engineering ou execução financeira. O fato de alguém ser conhecido dentro da comunidade ou ter participado de diferentes iniciativas não substitui completamente esse tipo de evidência. Quanto maior o orçamento e mais institucional o escopo, maior deveria ser o padrão de verificabilidade sobre capacidade de execução.
A gestão prática também parece concentrada em um núcleo muito pequeno. Para um projeto que pretende produzir um framework de governança descentralizada, essa estrutura parece excessivamente centralizada. Não é necessário que toda a comunidade participe diretamente da gestão, porque isso provavelmente tornaria o processo ineficiente. Entretanto, seria esperada uma arquitetura organizacional mais plural.
Poderiam existir working groups responsáveis por diferentes áreas, pesquisadores externos, revisores metodológicos independentes, especialistas em mechanism design, data analysis, behavioral economics ou governance research, além de representantes de diferentes categorias de participantes. Também seria possível criar algum tipo de advisory panel formal com responsabilidades e critérios claros. Isso reduziria a dependência intelectual e operacional de poucas pessoas.
A comunidade parece ocupar principalmente uma posição de consulta e validação. O desenho geral continua relativamente top-down: um núcleo pequeno conduz a pesquisa, desenvolve o framework e os modelos e depois coleta feedback. Seria preferível uma estrutura mais homogênea, em que diferentes partes da comunidade pudessem participar mais diretamente da construção dos componentes do framework, principalmente considerando que os mecanismos desenvolvidos poderão eventualmente afetar esses mesmos grupos.
O orçamento é provavelmente a principal razão pela qual a proposta não pode ser apoiada em sua forma atual. ₳4.207.967 é uma solicitação muito significativa. O tamanho do orçamento não é, isoladamente, motivo para rejeição. Um projeto importante pode justificar um orçamento elevado. O problema é que a granularidade apresentada não permite compreender de forma satisfatória como esse valor foi construído.
Categorias como Conceptualization, Modeling of Incentives, Science & Research, Administration & Coordination, Community Engagement e Data Engineering recebem valores substanciais, mas permanecem descritas em um nível muito agregado. Não é possível compreender adequadamente quantas pessoas trabalharão em cada frente, quantas horas serão dedicadas, quais rates serão utilizados, quais atividades serão realizadas internamente ou terceirizadas, como os custos foram estimados e como as responsabilidades serão distribuídas.
Existe também alguma sobreposição conceitual entre diferentes categorias. Conceptualization, Science & Research e Modeling of Incentives, por exemplo, parecem conter atividades relacionadas. Da mesma forma, Data Engineering, Website & Dashboard e partes de Modeling podem compartilhar componentes técnicos. Sem uma decomposição mais detalhada, torna-se difícil determinar se os valores são razoáveis ou se existe duplicação de custos entre workstreams.
A existência de um orçamento operacional mais detalhado mantido separadamente não resolve completamente esse problema. Se os dReps são chamados a autorizar o Treasury Withdrawal, a informação necessária para avaliar o valor solicitado deveria estar disponível no momento da decisão. Auditoria posterior pode verificar se o dinheiro foi utilizado conforme planejado, mas não substitui a capacidade de avaliar previamente se o preço do trabalho proposto é adequado.
Também não é suficiente justificar o valor principalmente pela comparação com o Net Change Limit. O fato de ₳4,2 milhões representarem uma pequena porcentagem da capacidade total de gasto do Treasury não demonstra value for money. A pergunta relevante não é se o Treasury pode pagar, mas se esse conjunto específico de entregas justifica esse custo.
Seria mais convincente apresentar benchmarks de custos, composição detalhada da equipe, remuneração esperada por função, dedicação estimada, fornecedores, infraestrutura e custos associados a cada milestone. Isso permitiria comparar o orçamento com o volume de trabalho e avaliar proporcionalidade.
Riscos e preocupações
A adoção prática limitada cria um risco relevante de sunk cost. Isso não significa que pesquisa sem adoção não tenha valor; evidentemente pode ter. Entretanto, quando o orçamento é tão elevado, é razoável exigir uma conexão mais forte entre pesquisa e experimentação aplicada.
O número relativamente limitado de atores de governança consultados, workshops e atividades de community engagement também cria o risco de que o framework reflita principalmente a visão de um grupo pequeno de participantes mais ativos, em vez de uma base suficientemente ampla e diversa.
A estrutura de execução concentrada cria dependência intelectual e operacional de poucas pessoas. Esse ponto é particularmente relevante porque incentivos de governança não são apenas uma questão técnica. Eles envolvem escolhas normativas sobre quais comportamentos devem ser recompensados, quem pode receber compensação, quais atividades possuem valor, como evitar captura e como equilibrar participação com qualidade. Um framework criado por poucas pessoas, ainda que submetido posteriormente a consulta pública, pode incorporar assumptions relevantes antes mesmo de a comunidade participar da discussão.
Também existe o risco de outputs técnicos se tornarem substitutos de outcomes de governança. Dashboards, datasets, workshops, simulações, research questions, timeline adherence e disponibilidade de sistemas podem demonstrar execução sem resolver se o trabalho melhora participação, descentralização, accountability ou qualidade da governança.
A agregação do orçamento também cria incerteza sobre proporcionalidade e possível duplicação entre workstreams. Sem maior decomposição, continua difícil determinar se os valores destinados a Conceptualization, Science & Research, Modeling, Data Engineering, Website & Dashboard e Administration representam trabalhos distintos ou custos sobrepostos.
3. Voto e Justificativa
Voto: NO
A decisão não representa rejeição à iniciativa ou à necessidade de desenvolver melhores mecanismos de governança. Existe mérito significativo no problema identificado, na direção proposta e na tentativa de estruturar uma discussão que atualmente permanece fragmentada.
O que impede um voto favorável é a combinação entre um orçamento elevado, entregas mínimas pouco ambiciosas em alguns dos pontos mais importantes, poucos compromissos com experimentação prática, KPIs excessivamente focados em outputs técnicos, uma estrutura de execução concentrada e um orçamento que permanece high-level demais para permitir uma avaliação adequada de value for money. O nível atual de compromisso com outputs, pilotos, impacto mensurável, participação plural e transparência orçamentária ainda não é proporcional ao tamanho do Treasury Withdrawal solicitado.
Uma versão revisada poderia resolver grande parte dessas preocupações sem alterar radicalmente o conceito original. Múltiplos modelos ou famílias de mecanismos deveriam se tornar entregas obrigatórias, acompanhados de comparações estruturadas entre alternativas, pilotos mais concretos e melhor definidos, KPIs ligados diretamente a melhorias observáveis na governança, uma estrutura organizacional mais plural e uma decomposição muito mais detalhada do orçamento. Também seria importante ampliar a documentação pública sobre o track record da equipe e deixar mais claro quem será responsável por cada workstream. Com essas mudanças, uma nova versão poderia se tornar apoiável.
4. Conclusão
O Governance Incentives Framework aborda um problema legítimo e propõe uma direção potencialmente valiosa para a governança da Cardano. A solicitação atual, entretanto, não apresenta outputs, experimentação prática, outcomes mensuráveis de governança, pluralidade organizacional ou transparência orçamentária em nível proporcional a ₳4,21 milhões. O voto, portanto, é NO em sua forma atual.
- No90.5K ₳Rationale
The topic matters and the methodology looks solid, but over 4 million ada for research whose main output is a framework document is hard to justify, particularly when the proposal itself notes overlap with Input Output Research's ongoing Cardano Vision 2026 work.
The core options for DRep compensation are also already well understood and openly debated in the community, see for example: https://dreptalk.com/t/options-for-drep-compensation-and-who-should-actually-pay-fo-in60zg/
I'd rather see that already-funded research conclude first.
- Yes85.6K ₳Rationale
EN — iFly (SWADA) votes YES.
First, my interest: I'm an active DRep and I run a stake pool. If this work leads to DRep compensation, I could get paid by it. Saying so up front.
Why I want this research done: we are losing DRep decentralisation, fast. Active DReps fell in every 12-epoch period of the first year. Concentration went up, not down (Gini 0.92 to 0.94). Something like 11-16 DReps now control 51% of the voting power. A Constitutional Committee consortium quit because nobody was paying them. Governance power is now more concentrated than stake is — and stake concentration is the thing everyone watches. Meanwhile being a DRep costs you: a locked 500 ada deposit earning nothing, transaction fees, and far more importantly, hours of real work per proposal. Right now you pay to participate. That is exactly backwards, and it quietly selects for people who can afford it.
WHAT I WANT OUT OF THIS — and I'll be blunt about it:
The goal is MORE DReps. Not better-paid big DReps. If this research comes back recommending payment simply proportional to delegation, it will have made concentration worse and wasted 4.2 million ada. The measure of success is whether the number of independent, genuinely active DReps goes UP.
So find a way to pay small DReps proportionally more. Somebody with a few thousand ada delegated to them, who reads the proposals and writes real rationales, should not be out of pocket for it. That is the person this framework has to reach. Lowering that barrier is how you grow the number of representatives, and growing the number is how you fix the concentration.
Now the hard part, and please don't dodge it: paying small DReps more per ada invites gaming. A large holder can split their stake across many small DReps they control and farm the higher rate. That's a Sybil attack wearing a different hat. I know this makes the design harder. Do it anyway. Do NOT let 'we couldn't solve the Sybil problem' become the excuse for a safe proportional model that just pays the incumbents — that outcome is worse than doing nothing, because it spends treasury money entrenching the exact problem we're trying to fix.
Some directions I think are worth testing:
Anchor everything to delegated stake, because stake is scarce and can't be duplicated. A flat payment per DRep is an open invitation to spin up bots.
Use a floor and a ceiling. A minimum delegation to qualify makes bot DReps expensive, since each one has to attract real stake. Earnings that flatten out past a saturation point stop anyone chasing delegation purely for the money. This is the same shape as k and saturation for stake pools — a mechanism every operator already understands, and it works.
Don't treat 'published a rationale' as proof of work. Text is cheap to generate now. It only means something on top of a real stake floor.
And keep in mind some competition for delegation is healthy. A good representative should attract stake. What needs to go is chasing delegation purely as income, disconnected from whether you're doing the job well.
WHAT I DON'T LIKE ABOUT THIS PROPOSAL: the money goes as one lump sum to an ordinary key-controlled wallet. No escrow, no milestone payments, no multisig. The refund promises are words, not mechanisms. The detailed budget is deliberately kept private, so we're voting on eleven summary numbers. Admin and conceptualisation are about 22% of the total before any research comes out, while the independent audit is 3% — and the auditor isn't named and gets paid out of the grant.
I'm voting YES anyway, because the problem is real and urgent and the design questions are genuinely hard enough to be worth researching properly. But I want escrowed, milestone-released funding, the full budget published, and a named auditor. If milestones aren't met, I'll back returning the money to the treasury.
SV — iFly (SWADA) röstar JA.
Först mitt intresse: jag är aktiv DRep och driver en stakepool. Om det här arbetet leder till ersättning för DReps kan jag komma att få betalt. Det säger jag rakt ut.
Varför jag vill att forskningen görs: vi håller på att tappa decentraliseringen bland DReps, snabbt. Antalet aktiva DReps sjönk under varje tolvepoksperiod under det första året. Koncentrationen ökade i stället för att minska (Gini 0,92 till 0,94). Ungefär 11-16 DReps kontrollerar nu 51 % av röststyrkan. Ett konsortium i konstitutionsutskottet hoppade av för att ingen betalade dem. Styrningsmakten är nu mer koncentrerad än vad staken är — och det är stake-koncentrationen alla håller ögonen på. Samtidigt kostar det att vara DRep: en låst deposition på 500 ada som inte ger något, transaktionsavgifter, och framför allt timmar av verkligt arbete per förslag. Just nu betalar man för att delta. Det är precis bakvänt, och det sållar tyst fram dem som har råd.
VAD JAG VILL FÅ UT AV DET HÄR — och jag säger det rakt:
Målet är FLER DReps. Inte bättre betalda stora DReps. Om forskningen kommer tillbaka och rekommenderar ersättning rakt proportionell mot delegering har den gjort koncentrationen värre och slösat bort 4,2 miljoner ada. Måttet på framgång är om antalet oberoende, verkligt aktiva DReps ÖKAR.
Så hitta ett sätt att betala små DReps proportionellt mer. Någon med några tusen ada delegerat till sig, som läser förslagen och skriver riktiga motiveringar, ska inte förlora på det. Det är den personen ramverket måste nå. Att sänka den tröskeln är hur man får fler representanter, och fler representanter är hur man löser koncentrationen.
Nu det svåra, och snälla, smit inte från det: att betala små DReps mer per ada inbjuder till utnyttjande. En stor innehavare kan dela upp sin stake på många små DReps under eget inflytande och håva in den högre ersättningen. Det är en Sybil-attack i annan skepnad. Jag vet att det gör designen svårare. Gör det ändå. Låt INTE 'vi kunde inte lösa Sybil-problemet' bli ursäkten för en trygg proportionell modell som bara betalar dem som redan sitter där — det utfallet är sämre än att inte göra något alls, för då används statskassans pengar till att cementera precis det problem vi försöker lösa.
Några riktningar jag tycker är värda att testa:
Förankra allt i delegerad stake, för stake är knappt och kan inte dupliceras. En fast ersättning per DRep är en öppen inbjudan att starta bottar.
Använd ett golv och ett tak. Ett krav på minsta delegering gör bot-DReps dyra, eftersom var och en måste attrahera verklig stake. En ersättning som planar ut efter en mättnadspunkt gör att ingen jagar delegering bara för pengarna. Det är samma form som k och mättnad för stakepooler — en mekanism varje operatör redan förstår, och den fungerar.
Betrakta inte 'publicerade en motivering' som bevis på arbete. Text är billig att generera nu. Det betyder något först ovanpå ett verkligt stake-golv.
Och kom ihåg att viss konkurrens om delegering är sund. En bra representant ska attrahera stake. Det som måste bort är att jaga delegering enbart som inkomst, frikopplat från om man gör jobbet bra.
VAD JAG INTE GILLAR MED FÖRSLAGET: pengarna går som en klumpsumma till en vanlig nyckelstyrd plånbok. Ingen spärr, inga delutbetalningar mot delmål, ingen multisig. Återbetalningslöftena är ord, inte mekanismer. Den detaljerade budgeten hålls medvetet privat, så vi röstar på elva sammanfattande siffror. Administration och konceptualisering är omkring 22 % av totalen innan något forskningsresultat kommit fram, medan den oberoende granskningen är 3 % — och granskaren är inte namngiven och betalas ur anslaget.
Jag röstar JA ändå, för problemet är verkligt och brådskande och designfrågorna är svåra nog att förtjäna ordentlig forskning. Men jag vill se spärrad finansiering som betalas ut mot delmål, hela budgeten publicerad och en namngiven granskare. Nås inte delmålen stödjer jag att pengarna går tillbaka till statskassan. - Abstain75.2K ₳No rationale
- No63.1K ₳No rationale
- No56.1K ₳Rationale
nope.
A PDF version of this rationale is also made available.
I can also voice what Megan said already - this is a research grant, not anything with concrete outcomes.
In isolation, this would be a big plus for me, as it distributes and decentralizes Cardano’s research - away from the monolithic IOR team - and fully in line with other independent community research groups, like the Incentive WG. However, a grant over roughly 1m USD for a 12-month project, run by 2 people, that aims to provide an answer to a widely contested and highly emotional topic seems kinda ridiculous. Especially with such a proposal, which reads a little unprofessional.
Costs are nicely broken down into categories, but neither category gets justified for, or explained at all(??)... Which would be crucial, because the amounts are not intuitive - and appear to be very expensive.
I do like the S.M.A.R.T. KPIs, but at the same time consider them to be rather random and hardly quality-controlling. Anyone can talk to 50 people and create a dashboard showing (something?) that loads in 3sec — for 1m USD.
The team may or may not be appropriate to lead this, I dont know them, but their Catalyst and Cardano track record seems… …ok? Ok enough I guess.
Scanning through the references and what the 2 proposers are actually bringing to the table: they quote a lot of content from other groups. All they (seem to) have written is https://cips.cardano.org/cps/CPS-0020 which is pretty good quality, but also not exactly rocket science. In it they say “what's bad” in their views, and what things would need to be considered for a “whats better”.Id welcome such a proposal if they were to start smaller and prove themselves to produce value worth 1m USD like by providing more research done by them, or generate previews or outlooks of where they see the outcome to go. Also, they should please break down the costs more - IO may get away with generic categories, but not a new research group.
- Abstain55.3K ₳Rationale
At its current state I will ABSTAIN from voting on this proposal. I do find value in an incentive program for Governance but feel this topic requires more discussion. 5M $ADA for research is not viable in my eyes at this time.
- Abstain45.3K ₳No rationale
- No15.7K ₳No rationale
- No14.3K ₳No rationale
- Yes6.8K ₳No rationale
- No3.7K ₳No rationale
- No3.5K ₳Rationale unavailable
- Yes2.7K ₳No rationale
- Abstain1.2K ₳Rationale unavailable
- Yes690.6 ₳No rationale
- NoChanged293.8 ₳History
Earlier votes
Abstain1mo agoSuperseded
- NoChanged166.8 ₳History
Earlier votes
Yes27d agoSuperseded
Voting YES on Governance Incentives Framework 2026 (₳4.21M). As elected Cardano Civics Committee member, Unified Cardano Student Club President in Nigeria, and advocate for inclusive governance, I support rigorous research into sustainable incentives for DReps and other actors. Current participation costs time and money, which risks concentrating power and excluding voices from emerging markets and student communities like those I work with in Africa. A well-designed framework that increases the number of independent, active DReps (not just better-paying existing large ones) would strengthen decentralisation and long-term participation. I expect transparent methodology, clear success metrics focused on diversity of active participants, and full public reporting. This is an investment in healthier governance rather than a blank cheque.
- No10.8 ₳Rationale unavailable
- No6 ₳Rationale unavailable