Withdraw ₳1,300,000 for Blockfrost Platform community budget proposal
200 DReps voted · 62 with a rationale · 4 changed their vote · 8 re-voted unchanged
Open a row to read the rationale.
Changed votes: 2 to yes, 2 to no, together voting with 35.5M ₳ of voting power.
- Yes222.9K ₳No rationale
- Yes217.1K ₳No rationale
- Yes201.5K ₳No rationale
- Yes189.8K ₳No rationale
- 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
While the Blockfrost Platform community budget proposal aims to decentralize a key Cardano API through the Icebreakers program, I’m voting "nay" due to concerns about its necessity, unclear financials, and competing priorities. Moreover, I believe the Cardano treasury should prioritize projects with transparent budgets, immediate ecosystem impact, or support for existing decentralized alternatives like Koios. I encourage refining the proposal with a clear budget, evidence of SPO commitment, and a stronger case for why Blockfrost’s API is essential over alternatives.
- Yes138.6K ₳No rationale
- Yes126.4K ₳No rationale
- Yes124.6K ₳No rationale
- No109.8K ₳No rationale
- Yes102.5K ₳No rationale
- YesChanged90.6K ₳Rationale
🧭 Evaluation Methodology and Rationale
Given the unprecedented volume and technical depth of the 39 Treasury Withdrawal Governance Actions submitted in this cycle, a comprehensive, proposal-by-proposal audit of budgets, scopes, and implementation frameworks would demand a level of time and resourcing incompatible with the available review window.
Rather than abstaining from participation, I adopted a hybrid evaluation methodology that combines AI-assisted content parsing with structured human analysis. This standardized checklist framework was designed to streamline high-volume assessment while preserving critical reasoning, contextual understanding, and value-based judgment.
All final decisions reflect deliberate human oversight — AI outputs serve to accelerate comprehension and comparison, but no vote is cast without manual review and a principled assessment of relevance, feasibility, and accountability.
📋 Checklist Criteria Explained
Each proposal is evaluated across seven standardized dimensions using a three-point scale:
✅ Yes — fully meets the criterion
🟡 Partial — partially meets the criterion
❌ No — does not meet the criterion1️⃣ Ecosystem Essentiality
Does the proposal address a critical function within Cardano, or is it peripheral or redundant?
This criterion assesses the strategic relevance of the initiative. Proposals should contribute meaningfully to Cardano’s infrastructure, decentralization, usability, or long-term resilience. Initiatives that duplicate existing efforts or lack demonstrable alignment with ecosystem priorities may score lower.2️⃣ KPIs or Impact Identifiers
Does the proposal define measurable success indicators or quantifiable outcomes?
This includes Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), numerical targets, milestones with metrics, or other tangible proxies of progress. The absence of quantifiable measures introduces uncertainty around potential impact and limits effective performance tracking.3️⃣ Milestones and Deliverables
Are there clear, time-bound milestones with verifiable deliverables and acceptance criteria?
Effective proposals define not only what will be delivered, but also when and how success will be verified. This enables staged disbursement, delivery monitoring, and community oversight. Lack of milestone clarity may indicate execution risk.4️⃣ Team Visibility & Track Record
Is the proposing team clearly identified, with relevant expertise and a verifiable delivery history?
This criterion evaluates the transparency and credibility of the individuals or organizations responsible for delivery. Established contributors with proven ecosystem involvement are preferred. Anonymous or unvetted teams may raise accountability concerns.5️⃣ Budget Structure and Detail
Is the budget transparently structured, with clear categories, amounts, and justification?
A strong proposal includes itemized costs (e.g., per workstream, staff role, tooling), explains the rationale behind budget allocations, and clarifies estimation methods. Lack of detail in budget structure reduces transparency and erodes confidence in treasury stewardship.6️⃣ Internal Consistency
Are the on-chain metadata, proposal content, and budget details aligned?
Consistency across all proposal components — including funding amounts, receiving addresses, project scope, and references — is essential. Misalignment creates confusion, undermines credibility, and may signal governance process weaknesses.7️⃣ Conflict of Interest
Does this proposal present a potential conflict of interest that could compromise the impartiality of the evaluation?
To preserve the integrity of the voting process, any proposal in which I (as evaluator) hold a significant, non-marginal conflict of interest will be automatically met with an ABSTAIN vote. Minor or indirect associations are disclosed where relevant, but only material conflicts — such as direct financial involvement, employment, or formal partnership — trigger abstention. This ensures all evaluations remain transparent, independent, and in service of the broader Cardano community.
🧭 Evaluation: Blockfrost Platform Community Budget Proposal (₳1,300,000)
📋 Checklist Evaluation
1️⃣ Ecosystem Essentiality
✅ Yes
“At its peak, Blockfrost was handling over 50% of all on-chain transactions on Cardano.”
“The demand for a reliable infrastructure and tools that support development is what led to the creation of Blockfrost.”Blockfrost plays a major infrastructural role in Cardano, providing an API gateway used by many dApps and developers. The proposal directly addresses the decentralization of this critical component, aligning with the Cardano Vision 2025.
2️⃣ Budget Structure and Detail
🟡 Partial
“We are requesting an annual budget of $120,000 to support one full-time employee (FTE)... Our total funding request from the treasury is $650,000, which is equivalent to approximately 1,300,000 ADA... This amounts to a total of 5 FTEs.”
“We estimate the cost of [a security audit] to be $50,000.”While the total ask and headcount are provided, there’s no line-by-line cost breakdown across categories like infrastructure, maintenance, R&D, UX, or documentation. The proposal lacks clarity on how the remaining $400,000+ is distributed beyond FTE and audit. More detailed cost attribution across operational areas would strengthen transparency.
3️⃣ KPIs or Impact Identifiers
✅ Yes
“At least 100 active Icebreakers by end of year, 2025.”
“100% of transactions submitted through Blockfrost will be handled by the Icebreakers by end of year, 2025.”
“Quarterly updates provided on the SPO call.”
“Monthly community development call.”These KPIs are clear, quantitative, and time-bound, offering reasonable metrics to track decentralization progress and community engagement.
4️⃣ Milestones and Deliverables
✅ Yes
“All milestones are clearly documented and tracked on our Github roadmap to promote accountability and transparency.”
“Icebreakers era: Blockfrost platform initial release, Transaction submission endpoint, Gateway, Onboarding...”
“Hopper era: Hydra payment channels between platform and gateway...”The roadmap structure is commendable and publicly accessible. However, acceptance criteria per milestone are not disclosed in the on-chain submission or linked documentation. Publishing more granular, milestone-specific acceptance criteria would enhance community oversight and reduce ambiguity in future progress evaluations.
5️⃣ Internal Consistency
✅ Yes
ADA requested: ₳1,300,000
USD estimate: $650,000
Rate implied: 1 ADA = $0.50The metadata, funding amount, and SAC alignment are all consistent. No internal discrepancies observed.
6️⃣ Team Visibility & Track Record
✅ Yes
“Marek: Primary project lead (part-time)
Beatrice: Community engagement lead
Vladimir: Gateway lead
Michal: Platform lead
Sefa: Caching lead
Bart: Conformance testing lead”The team is named with defined roles, and key members (e.g., Marek Mahut) are publicly known in the Cardano ecosystem. Blockfrost has a strong track record from previous infrastructure contributions, and the team appears technically capable of executing the work.
7️⃣ Conflict of Interest
✅ No significant conflict identified
No direct financial or employment ties between evaluator and vendor. Evaluation proceeds independently.
🧾 Summary
Blockfrost is a widely used API platform in the Cardano ecosystem, and this proposal seeks to decentralize its architecture through the Icebreakers program. It aims to redistribute traffic handling to SPOs, increase fault tolerance, and reduce centralization risks.
The proposal provides clear KPIs, a public roadmap, and names a qualified team. While the budget is generally reasonable for the scope, it lacks granular breakdown across functional areas (e.g., tooling, hosting, governance). The absence of granular milestone acceptance criteria slightly reduces auditability but is partially mitigated by the use of third-party assurers.
🗳️ Voting Recommendation: YES
Despite the partial score on budget structuring and the lack of public milestone acceptance criteria, the proposal presents a critical infrastructure improvement with open-source deliverables, decentralized architecture, and a strong operational team. The risks are manageable and the expected benefits — in terms of resilience, decentralization, and developer onboarding — are significant and measurable.
Earlier votes
Abstain1y agoSuperseded
Yes1y 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
- Yes74.5K ₳Rationale
As a DRep, I vote Yes. I personally run a Cardano pool and am also participating in Blockfrost’s Icebreaker program. I support their decentralization efforts, vision, and the way they are executing it.
- Yes65.9K ₳No rationale
- Yes63.1K ₳No rationale
- Yes59.1K ₳No rationale
- Yes58.7K ₳Rationale
It supports decentralizing critical API infrastructure via the Icebreaker roadmap, enabling SPO-hosted Blockfrost nodes.
Blockfrost is used by over 50% of dApp developers, and this budget helps transition from single-point centralization to a secure, open-source, and SPO-powered model.
I appreciate the $50K security audit. - Yes56.4K ₳No rationale
- Yes56.1K ₳No rationale
- Yes51.8K ₳No rationale
- Yes48.7K ₳No rationale
- NoChanged48K ₳History
Earlier votes
Yes1y agoSuperseded
- Yes45.3K ₳No rationale
- Yes36.9K ₳No rationale
- Yes36.4K ₳Rationale
✅ Blockfrost Platform – ₳1,300,000
Why I voted YES:
Blockfrost has become essential infrastructure for Cardano developers, abstracting node interaction and enabling rapid dApp development. This proposal takes a critical step forward: decentralizing the Blockfrost API through the Icebreakers network—a system that lets SPOs process requests and earn rewards.Key deliverables include:
• Decentralized data access through Blockfrost Gateway
• Revenue sharing for node operators
• Hydra integration for fast microtransactions
• Solitary mode for enterprise-grade, customizable deployments
• Open-source infrastructure to avoid vendor lock-inThis is a strategic investment to decentralize tooling and support SPO income, while maintaining developer-friendly APIs.
- Yes28.8K ₳No rationale
- Yes26.7K ₳Rationale
Blockfrost is essential for the ecosystem and is owned and operated by IOG. I have faith that the money for this project will be spent wisely.
- Yes15.3K ₳No rationale
- Yes14.3K ₳No rationale
- Yes10.7K ₳Rationale
I vote for this proposal
- Yes8.4K ₳No rationale
- Yes6.8K ₳No rationale
- Yes5.7K ₳No rationale
- Yes3.6K ₳No rationale
- Yes1.7K ₳No rationale
- Yes1.6K ₳No rationale
- Yes688.8 ₳No rationale
- Yes675.6 ₳No rationale
- Abstain335.9 ₳No rationale
- Abstain52.8 ₳No rationale
- YesRevoted13.5 ₳History
Earlier votes
Yes1y agoSuperseded
- Yes8.3 ₳No rationale
- Yes6.3 ₳No rationale
- Yes0 ₳No rationale
- Yes0 ₳No rationale
- YesRevoted0 ₳History
Earlier votes
Yes1y agoSuperseded
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Yes1y agoSuperseded