Withdraw ₳1,161,000 for zkFold ZK Rollup administered by Intersect
191 DReps voted · 59 with a rationale · 2 changed their vote · 6 re-voted unchanged
Open a row to read the rationale.
Changed votes: 2 to yes, together voting with 14.8M ₳ of voting power.
- Yes185K ₳No rationale
- Yes161K ₳Rationale
I am voting yes on all 39 Intersect Governance actions. The community has thoroughly reviewed the many proposals presented in the Intersect Budget Process for the 2025 budget. I was deeply involved in the entire process as an SME for the Budget Committee, and then as the Secretary for the Budget Committee.
The proposals presented represent an incredible amount of development for our ecosystem for the next year. The teams all received at least 50% on Ekklesia polling. The teams will face milestones in order to continue to receive funding. If a team fails to deliver, the process will stop them from enriching themselves without returning value.
If anything, we are spending too little on our community. We need to spend more to further develop our governance and our organized events. This is a liquid democracy. If you believe that all of these proposals deserve a chance to deliver, you can shift your delegation to my DRep ID.
- Yes157.8K ₳No rationale
- No149.8K ₳Rationale
zkFold ZK Rollup, while very promising, should demonstrate mainnet readiness or secure smaller funding (e.g., via Catalyst) before requesting significant treasury funds. I encourage refining the proposal with a detailed budget and clearer milestones to address its prematurity.
- Yes138.6K ₳No rationale
- Yes126.4K ₳No rationale
- Yes124.6K ₳No rationale
- Yes102.5K ₳No rationale
- NoChanged90.6K ₳Rationale
🗳 Governance Action Review
Proposal: Withdraw ₳1,161,000 for zkFold ZK Rollup
Vendor: zkFold SA (administered by Intersect)
Governance Action ID: gov_action13tf...tnrdnx
Submitted: 18 July 2025
Expires: 17 August 2025
Type: Treasury Withdrawal
Budget Requested: ₳1,161,000
📋 Evaluation Checklist
1️⃣ Ecosystem Essentiality → ✅ Yes
“ZK rollups enable Cardano to process significantly more transactions per second (TPS) by bundling and verifying transactions off-chain.”
“This treasury withdrawal funds zkFold ZK Rollup which will provide the following services: … a general-purpose zero knowledge rollup solution for Cardano.”🔍 The proposal targets a key component of Cardano’s scalability roadmap. Zero-knowledge rollups are a well-established technique to boost throughput and reduce costs, and this offering appears tailored to Cardano’s architecture.
2️⃣ Budget Structure and Detail → ❌ No
“Budget for 12 months:
• Complete MVP: 180k $
• Integration with wallets: 100k $
• Integration with Cardano indexers: 100k $
• Aggregation server optimization: 120k $
• Client-side proving optimization: 120k $
• Tools for DApp integration: 240k $”🔍 While top-level cost categories are presented in USD, there is no breakdown by labor, infrastructure, or tooling. Terms like “Complete MVP” or “Tools for DApp integration” are too vague to assess allocation logic. No hourly rates, and resource mapping are included.
💬 Important: Due to zkFold’s history of receiving Catalyst funding for similar technical scopes, a more granular budget is necessary to identify potential cost duplication with previous grants.
3️⃣ KPIs or Impact Identifiers → ❌ No
The proposal references potential impact areas (e.g. "improved scalability", "lower fees", "increased adoption") but does not include any quantifiable KPIs or success metrics.
🔍 There are no throughput targets, DApp onboarding goals, system benchmarks, or adoption milestones.
💬 Suggested examples: TPS performance goals, number of transactions handled in testnet, contracts integrated with zkFold, or number of DApps adopting the rollup over time.
4️⃣ Milestones and Deliverables → ❌ No
“Milestones:
• Rollup documentation
• Transaction aggregation server
• Wallet API
• Indexer API
• Rollup validation logic implementation
• Toolkit for DApp integration”🔍 While milestone titles are listed, the proposal lacks delivery timelines, success criteria, or sequencing. It’s unclear whether items are parallel or sequential, and no public checkpoints are offered.
💬 Important: zkFold has received 7 grants via Project Catalyst, with 3 completed, 1 nearing official closure, and 3 significantly delayed. This raises concerns about parallel workload management and execution feasibility for this Governance Action.
5️⃣ Internal Consistency → ✅ Yes
No internal contradictions were found between the proposal metadata and narrative.
6️⃣ Team Visibility & Track Record → 🟡 Partial
“The zkFold team consists of expert Haskell, Rust, and ZKP developers and Cryptographers.”
“zkFold team has successfully [been] moving towards the TestNet of our ZK Rollup.”- zkFold is known for developing ZK-based tooling such as zkFold Symbolic, zkFold Prover Backend, and UPLC converter, using Haskell and ZKP frameworks.
- The team was featured in Cardano’s L2 expansion events and has received 7 Project
Catalyst grants:- 3 completed (e.g., zkFold Symbolic, zkFold Prover Backend).
- 1 near completion.
- 3 are delayed by several months.
- Despite a credible technical profile, the absence of these references in the proposal diminishes evaluability and accountability.
💬 The team appears competent and Cardano-native, but the lack of direct transparency and the accumulation of unfinished Catalyst scopes introduce legitimate risk. These omissions are particularly critical when requesting treasury funds of this size.
7️⃣ Conflict of Interest → ✅ No
No conflict of interest identified at the time of evaluation.
If any material conflict emerges, the evaluator commits to automatic abstention under a standing policy of governance neutrality.
🧾 Summary and Recommendation
Summary:
This proposal by zkFold SA requests ₳1.16M to deliver a general-purpose ZK Rollup solution for Cardano. While the project aligns well with strategic priorities for Layer 2 scaling and zkFold has demonstrated past technical contributions via Catalyst, the Governance Action lacks essential information. Budget items are vague and unauditable. No KPIs or adoption targets are included. Milestones are underspecified, and the team’s execution history—while credible—is burdened by parallel delays not disclosed in the proposal.
Voting Recommendation:
❌ Vote NO
Rationale:
Strategic relevance does not override execution risk and opacity. Without clear KPIs, a traceable roadmap, or detailed costing, this treasury withdrawal poses material risk of misallocation or redundancy. High-value ZK infrastructure is vital, but it must be accompanied by strong accountability. This proposal, as written, does not meet that bar.
Earlier votes
Abstain1y agoSuperseded
No1y agoSuperseded
- Yes83.9K ₳Rationale
I am voting in favor of approving the treasury withdrawal for all 39 withdrawal actions that are part of the approved ecosystem budget administered by Intersect. I am voting this way for several reasons, as I will outline here. This rationale will be included in all 39 withdrawal votes.
First and foremost, I believe that we would be making a mistake in underfunding our community with our available treasury funds. The budget system as it currently stands has some flaws, as should be expected from a first version of any system. Of the current proposals, I voted to include several in the budget when it was being formed; however, I also did not vote in favor of several others. This is, of course, the case for most DReps. If I were to vote only for the proposals I initially favoured, and all other DReps did the same, we would likely approve only 2 or 3 proposals out of 39 due to the vote split. In my view, this is not an acceptable outcome for the community, and this is why I was also opposed to the idea of having 39 separate treasury withdrawal actions. I have reviewed all 39 requests, and they all have merit. Are they exactly in line with the priorities I wanted as part of the initial budget? No. Is that reason enough to vote no on several of these and end up approving only 2 or 3 proposals in the end? I certainly don't believe so.
In addition to this, the total amount of the intersect budget is roughly 10% higher than what I voted for, and I find that to be within an acceptable margin to approve all the withdrawals.
The individual proposals also all received at least 50% community approval to be included and will be subject to reviews and milestones to receive funds.
For these reasons, I am casting my vote to approve and am wishing the best of luck to all the teams waiting for funding through this process. - No77.2K ₳No rationale
- Abstain74.5K ₳No rationale
- Yes65.9K ₳No rationale
- Yes63.1K ₳No rationale
- Yes58.7K ₳Rationale
Zero-knowledge tech is vital for future private transactions and scalable L2s.
Please ensure clear audit timeline, developer SDK deliverables, and public testnet targets are published during Q1 disbursements. - Yes56.4K ₳No rationale
- Yes56.1K ₳No rationale
- Yes51.8K ₳No rationale
- Yes48.7K ₳No rationale
- Yes48K ₳No rationale
- No45.3K ₳No rationale
- Yes36.9K ₳No rationale
- Yes36.4K ₳Rationale
✅ zkFold ZK Rollup – ₳1,161,000
Why I voted YES:
zkFold is building a general-purpose ZK rollup solution to scale Cardano without compromising decentralization or security. Their prototype already proves it fits within on-chain execution limits. This tech compresses hundreds of smart contract transactions into a single L1 transaction, paving the way for massive dApp scalability.Key benefits:
• ⚡️ Higher throughput
• 💸 Lower fees for users and dApps
• 🔐 Preserves L1 security guarantees
• 📈 Enables micro-payments and broader adoption
• 🔧 Built by expert Rust, Haskell, and ZK cryptography engineersWith L2 scaling being mission-critical, this proposal supports a key infrastructure pillar for Cardano’s future.
- Yes14.3K ₳No rationale
- Yes10.7K ₳Rationale
I vote for this proposal
- Yes8.4K ₳No rationale
- Yes6.8K ₳No rationale
- No5.7K ₳No rationale
- No3.6K ₳No rationale
- Yes1.7K ₳No rationale
- Yes1.6K ₳No rationale
- Yes675.6 ₳No rationale
- Yes335.9 ₳No rationale
- Yes157.4 ₳No rationale
- Abstain52.8 ₳No rationale
- Yes13.5 ₳No rationale
- Yes6.3 ₳No rationale
- Yes0 ₳No rationale
- Yes0 ₳No rationale
- Yes0 ₳No rationale
- YesRevoted0 ₳History
Earlier votes
Yes1y agoSuperseded