Withdraw 25,400,000 ada for Intersect: Governance coordination and technical ...
170 DReps voted · 55 with a rationale · 6 changed their vote · 3 re-voted unchanged
Open a row to read the rationale.
Changed votes: 3 to yes, 1 to no, 2 to abstain, together voting with 248.4M ₳ of voting power.
- No1.1M ₳Rationale
Intersect’s proposal is a classic example of a well-functioning governance system asking for more funds just to keep things as they are. A hefty ₳25M isn't insignificant and definitely needs scrutiny beyond the polished jargon of “coordination” and “oversight.” While having resilient infrastructure and coordinated governance is important, the proposal fails to show how these actions add real value or avoid overlap with what's already out there. The reliance on various committees and outside oversight comes off more as bureaucratic fluff than a streamlined operation. Cardano shouldn't become a second European Union!
The smart contract framework from Sundae Labs for managing the treasury is a good move toward transparency, but it doesn’t really justify the amount of funding being asked for. The proposal avoids addressing real innovation or measurable impacts and rather concentrates on maintaining stable operations. I for one am not happy with Intersect's work. We should be asking ourselves: are we really funding progress, or are we just supporting a governance layer that might be simplified?
With a proposal of this size, I’d expect to see clear outcomes and efficient governance models. The governance system needs to grow and adapt, not just stay the same. Intersect has drafted a budget for bureaucracy rather than a chance for real change. And Cardano needs governance that pushes for change, not just maintains it.
- Yes1M ₳No rationale
- Abstain984.8K ₳No rationale
- Yes969.9K ₳No rationale
- Yes966.3K ₳No rationale
- Yes929.9K ₳Rationale
We vote YES on this proposal because Cardano currently needs a reliable operational and technical coordination layer to keep the ecosystem functioning as governance, infrastructure and protocol development become more decentralized. Intersect plays an important role in supporting governance coordination, committee work, release coordination, incident response, repository stewardship, technical processes and the administration of community-approved initiatives. These are not always highly visible functions, but they are important for Cardano’s stability, continuity and ability to execute decisions responsibly.
We recognize that the requested amount is significant and that Intersect has already received treasury funding in the past. For that reason, transparency, external assurance, milestone-based reporting and clear accountability are essential. However, the proposal is more focused than last year’s budget and prioritizes functions that are critical for Cardano’s operational resilience. In our view, this is not simply administrative overhead. It funds core coordination capacity that helps Cardano remain secure, reliable and governable during an important phase of ecosystem maturity. For these reasons, we support the proposal.
- Yes927.7K ₳No rationale
- No926K ₳No rationale
- Yes884.5K ₳No rationale
- Yes866.3K ₳No rationale
- Yes829.9K ₳Rationale
We support Interesct as a pivotal organization for Cardano's ecosystem
- Yes796.1K ₳No rationale
- Yes792.3K ₳No rationale
- Yes622K ₳No rationale
- Abstain604.7K ₳Rationale
Abstaining. Intersect performs functions Cardano genuinely needs governance coordination, incident response, technical stewardship. But ₳25.4M with minimal detail, self-funding structure, no published milestones is too large to approve on faith. Not rejection but a request for better information.
A PDF version of this rationale is also made available.
Intersect provides a function that Cardano genuinely needs: governance coordination, technical stewardship, incident response, and the operational backbone that translates community decisions into action. The November 2025 chain partition response demonstrated this value. A world without Intersect (or an equivalent) is a world where governance decisions sit unimplemented, security incidents go uncoordinated, and core repositories lack stewardship.
However, this proposal asks for ₳25.4 million with minimal budget detail, represents self-funding by the entity administering the funds, and would bring Intersect's total Treasury receipts to nearly ₳48 million in under two years. For an amount this large, I expect proportionate transparency. I do not find it here.
I cannot vote Yes in good conscience. But I also cannot vote No without first understanding whether the governance function would collapse without this funding. Abstain is not support. It is an acknowledgment that the question is too important to answer with the information available.
A No vote would reject the funding entirely. I am not prepared to do that because:- The function is genuinely important. Governance coordination does not happen spontaneously. Someone must do it.
- I do not have a better alternative ready. If Intersect were defunded tomorrow, I cannot point to an entity ready to assume these responsibilities.
- The operational track record exists. Intersect has delivered network upgrades, incident response, and committee coordination. This is not vaporware.
But a Yes vote would endorse a ₳25.4M self-funded request with minimal detail, setting a precedent that I cannot support.
Abstain is the honest position: I cannot judge this proposal reliably with the information provided. It is not support. It is not rejection. It is a demand for better information before I commit either way.
Intersect performs a function that Cardano needs. The governance coordination, technical stewardship, and incident response capabilities are real and have been demonstrated. I do not dismiss the value of this work.
But value does not justify any price, and self-funding does not justify opacity. For ₳25.4 million and nearly ₳48 million cumulative, I expect:
- A detailed budget, especially for the ₳18.8M "technical stewardship" line item
- An arms-length review before the ask reaches the chain
- A plan to reduce long-term dependency on a single entity
- An ADA volatility policy
- Published milestones with verification criteria
None of these are present. I cannot vote Yes on faith any longer. And I will not vote No on a function the ecosystem genuinely needs without a clear alternative.
Abstain is my vote. If Intersect resubmits with the transparency and structural improvements outlined above, I will evaluate it with fresh eyes and a genuinely open mind.
- Yes591.1K ₳Rationale
Supporting Withdrawal for this project to commence.
- Yes582.9K ₳No rationale
- Yes579.1K ₳No rationale
- No573.2K ₳No rationale
- Yes568K ₳Rationale
Intersect is worthy of moving forward and continue to improve. A lot of positive will come from this.
- Abstain503.6K ₳Rationale
I think intersect needs a lot of recalibration and restructuring before asking for treasury funds. A lot of details can be provided on this but in a nutshell I don’t think in its current form the ecosystem benefits something worth up to 20million Ada.
- Yes481.2K ₳No rationale
- Yes433.2K ₳No rationale
- No379.5K ₳Rationale
Intersect should be abolished, not funded!
- No379.3K ₳No rationale
- No366.6K ₳No rationale
- No356.1K ₳Rationale
This price is enormous. Intersect makes money by taking a cut of treasury withdrawals it submits on behalf of proposers - which is a valid service, as they put up the 100k deposit so that the proposers don't have to; as well as through paid membership subscriptions. It should not be the treasury's responsibility to pay such a massive amount of Ada to keep Intersect afloat. If it is struggling financially, then it is not a sound business model. Governance will not be impacted if Intersect stops operating. Development of the Haskell node can continue in a forked repository, or repo ownership can be transferred elsewhere. The developers won't go anywhere, only the expensive administrative overhead would go away - and I happen to know from experience that their operations could be significantly cheaper, but it's the conscious choice of only a few people to continue paying for overpriced operational costs. It's time to tighten the belt by a lot of notches.
- No342.8K ₳No rationale
- Yes330.6K ₳No rationale
- No321.8K ₳No rationale
- Yes321.6K ₳No rationale
- Yes313.8K ₳Rationale
As an employee of Intersect, I recognise that some people may expect me to abstain from voting on this proposal due to a perceived conflict of interest.
After careful consideration, I have chosen not to abstain and I am voting Yes.
Three main reasons for that are
First, my professional experience gives me a unique view of the work Intersect undertakes on behalf of the Cardano ecosystem every day. Much of it is operational, technical, and largely invisible to the wider community, yet underpins many of the governance and ecosystem processes people rely upon. Having seen the work first-hand, I believe the organisation has demonstrated its value and has presented a more focused, streamlined and community-aligned plan for the coming year.
Second, I don't believe abstaining simply because I work for Intersect would accurately reflect my genuine assessment of the proposal. Transparency matters, which is why I am declaring my position openly. I also believe DReps should vote according to their judgement, and this is mine.
Finally, I am also voting on behalf of delegated voting power entrusted to me by others. My delegates have expressed support for this proposal, and the proposal itself received support during the Hydra voting phase. I believe it would be wrong to abstain where doing so would not reflect the wishes of those who have trusted me with that responsibility.
My vote is therefore based on both my own assessment of Intersect's contribution to Cardano and my responsibility to represent my delegates faithfully.
Why I believe Intersect remains essential
As mentioned, much of Intersect's work is only seen when something goes wrong, or when nobody else is there to do it. Some of the criticism aimed at Intersect is, imho, unjustified through lack of understanding and awareness. Is often a mis-representation of the facts, or begins with a negative bias that does not allow anything other than negativity to be remarked upon, often for engagement, often wrong, and often causing unjustified reputational damage where incorrect.
The organisation coordinates functions that are open for anyone to perform, but which often have no obvious owner. In a decentralised ecosystem, permissionless does not automatically mean someone steps forward.
Intersect has now coordinated three major hard fork programmes and soon comes Dijkstra/Leios, one of the biggest architectural changes to Cardano since Shelley, and will be the first of this kind in the governance era.. Delivering that upgrade will require coordination across SPOs, exchanges, wallets, infrastructure providers, developers, governance bodies and the wider community on a scale we have not seen before.
Across the last three hard forks, Intersect has built the relationships, processes, communication channels and operational experience needed to coordinate this work effectively. Losing that capability now would mean losing years of experience immediately before the ecosystem enters perhaps its most ambitious upgrade yet.
Governance operations
When the Constitutional Committee risked falling below committeeMinSize, Cardano faced a genuine governance risk. Had that threshold not been restored in time, governance actions could have stalled.
What many people never saw were the countless hours of work that happened behind the scenes which included mobilising stakeholders during Cardano Summit 2025, standing up a dedicated voting platform, ensuring election legitimacy, hosting candidate Spaces, running a snap election, commissioning independent audits, drafting governance metadata, submitting governance actions on-chain and communicating throughout the entire process.
None of this was guaranteed to happen. Anyone could theoretically have taken it on, but there was no certainty that someone would, or that multiple competing efforts wouldn't have delayed a resolution at a critical point for governance. But Intersect did do it, and things were restored.
Technical stewardship
Another area is stewardship of Cardano's core technical infrastructure.
As Input Output continues decentralising responsibility for core repositories, more of that stewardship is moving into the wider ecosystem.
This includes repositories such as Cardano Node, interim stewardship of critical infrastructure like Ogmios and Kupo, as well as governance artefacts including the Constitution and governance action infrastructure.
These projects are open source, yes, again, anyone is free to contribute but that doesn't guarantee sustainable ownership.Somebody still needs to coordinate releases, maintain repositories, respond to incidents, oversee security processes and provide continuity. Right now, Intersect is carrying a significant part of that responsibility.
The same applies to ecosystem resilience.
Intersect coordinates incident response, works alongside the Security Council, supports disaster recovery exercises, helps prepare the ecosystem for upgrades and communicates during critical events. These are the kinds of activities that rarely attract attention when everything is running smoothly, but they become incredibly important when problems arise.
Some people argue that none of these functions belong exclusively to Intersect.
And I do agree, but the question has never been whether somebody else could do them but whether somebody will do them consistently, transparently, neutraly and with enough coordination to keep the ecosystem moving forward.
Cardano is still evolving. Until these responsibilities are naturally distributed across the ecosystem, I believe Intersect is a critical role in providing that coordination.
For those reasons, I believe this proposal is an investment in the governance, technical stewardship and operational coordination that keeps Cardano moving forward & I am voting Yes. - Yes297K ₳Rationale
What should we do? Not have intersect? No, for now at least, we need Intersect.
- No285.2K ₳No rationale
- No275.2K ₳Rationale
I am voting NO on “Intersect Governance coordination and technical stewardship for the Cardano ecosystem.” Intersect does perform governance coordination, incident response, and core‑repo stewardship that Cardano needs, and the technical work in WP2 is important. However, this proposal bundles 25.4M ADA of operations, technical stewardship, and a vague critical‑process reserve into a single all‑or‑nothing request, with security and resilience lines insufficiently itemised and no way to selectively fund the technical work without also approving broader operations and reserve funding.
In my view, recurring Treasury funding for administrator‑centric structures should be narrowly scoped, clearly separated from overlapping mandates, supported by detailed budgets and verifiable KPIs, and accompanied by a credible multi‑year plan to reduce reliance on Treasury capital. This proposal does not meet that standard, and together with separate Intersect‑related committee budgets, it represents an Intersect funding footprint that is too large, too bundled, and too weakly constrained for me to support under a disciplined treasury‑prudence framework.
- Yes268.9K ₳No rationale
- Yes260.8K ₳No rationale
- Yes196.9K ₳No rationale
- Abstain189.8K ₳No rationale
- Yes183.7K ₳No rationale
- Yes182.7K ₳No rationale
- No169.1K ₳No rationale
- Yes161.1K ₳No rationale
- Yes157.8K ₳No rationale
- No157.8K ₳No rationale
- Yes155.7K ₳No rationale
- No149.8K ₳Rationale
- Not clear ROI given my criteria bulletin points below
- 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.
- Abstain142.9K ₳No rationale
- Yes126.4K ₳No rationale
- Yes124.6K ₳No rationale