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.
- Yes122.8K ₳Rationale
I am voting yes because I believe Cardano's governance requires more than on-chain voting—it also requires a capable organization that can coordinate implementation, steward technical processes, and translate community decisions into measurable outcomes. As governance becomes increasingly decentralized, these coordination functions become more important, not less.
I view Intersect as a shared governance institution rather than a traditional vendor. Its role is to facilitate collaboration across committees, working groups, technical contributors, and the broader community while coordinating critical functions such as release management, incident response, repository stewardship, and the administration of community-approved initiatives. These are ecosystem-wide responsibilities that benefit Cardano as a whole rather than any single organization.
I recognize that this is a substantial Treasury request and that Intersect must continue demonstrating accountability, transparency, and measurable delivery. However, I believe that a decentralized ecosystem still requires a neutral coordination layer capable of supporting governance processes and ensuring community decisions are implemented effectively. For those reasons, I believe this proposal is a worthwhile investment in the long-term resilience and maturity of Cardano's governance.
- No90.6K ₳Rationale
Governance Action Review [EN] - Intersect: Governance Coordination and Technical Stewardship for the Cardano Ecosystem
1. Introduction
This Treasury Withdrawal requests 25,400,000 ADA, valued at USD 6,350,000 using an ADA/USD conversion rate of USD 0.25, to fund Intersect’s operating model from June 2026 to June 2027.
The proposal is divided into three work packages. WP1 allocates 6,000,000 ADA to Intersect operations and ecosystem coordination, including the operation of the Member-Based Organization, Cardano Development Holdings, eight elected committees, working groups, elections, membership systems, legal and financial administration, and governance support. WP2 allocates 18,800,000 ADA to technical stewardship, incident response, security coordination, repository management, release coordination, technical communications, and infrastructure supporting more than 130 repositories and more than 160 users. WP3 reserves 600,000 ADA to coordinate critical and time-sensitive processes that emerge without a predefined owner or budget.
Intersect would administer its own allocation through Treasury Reserve and Project-Specific Smart Contracts. Administrative actions require combinations of Intersect administrators, Intersect leadership, and members of an external Oversight Committee composed of Sundae Labs, Cardano Foundation, Dquadrant, NMKR, Sundial, and Eternl. Appold would provide independent audit and assurance.
The proposal includes quarterly milestone-based drawdowns, public updates, on-chain fund tracking, and the possible return of funds that are no longer required, cannot be responsibly deployed, or remain unspent. Intersect states that the requested amount was reduced from USD 7.875 million in the previous cycle to USD 6.35 million, while also clarifying that part of the reduction results from changes in scope and the separation of administration activities.
2. Governance Action Analysis
Positive aspects
Strategic importance to Cardano’s operational continuity
There are legitimate and strategically relevant reasons to continue funding Intersect. The organization performs functions that have become important to Cardano’s operation, particularly the stewardship of core repositories, coordination of releases and upgrades, incident response, support for governance structures, and administration of Treasury-funded initiatives.
The main reason to consider a favorable vote does not come from a demonstrated record of institutional efficiency, but from the strategic position Intersect has come to occupy within the ecosystem.
Intersect operates as a coordination layer among participants, organizations, committees, developers, infrastructure operators, and governance actors. Some essential Cardano activities have no single owner and must be organized among independent actors. An entity responsible for facilitating coordination, communication, incident response, and operational continuity therefore has real value.
Cardano is becoming a more distributed technical environment, with multiple organizations, new clients, different development teams, decentralized governance, and a growing number of participants responsible for interdependent components. This evolution increases the need for technical coordination. Decentralization does not eliminate coordination; it makes coordination more complex.
Stewardship of core Cardano repositories
Intersect performs a relevant technical function through the stewardship of important Cardano repositories, including infrastructure associated with the Haskell client and other core components.
The stewardship of more than one hundred repositories, access management, contributor coordination, release organization, and maintenance of development lifecycle processes are not trivial activities. Their continuity is important to the stability, security, and predictability of the network’s infrastructure.
No specific critical problems were identified in relation to repository stewardship. No substantial criticism of the Technical Steering Committee was identified either.
It would not be accurate to state that Intersect fails in all its functions or produces no technical value. Certain technical responsibilities may be performed adequately while serious deficiencies remain in other areas.
Agora do not have enough technical and operational knowledge to conduct a deep evaluation of the internal efficiency of these activities. The appropriate conclusion is not that excellent technical performance has been demonstrated, but that no critical problems were identified and the function itself is relevant.
Coordination of upgrades, releases, and incident response
The coordination of upgrades and releases in a decentralized blockchain has systemic relevance. Failures in this function can result in disorganization among operators, delays, incompatibilities, operational incidents, and loss of confidence.
The proposal also includes incident response, security coordination, bug bounties, red-team exercises, monitoring, and communication during critical events. The general necessity of these functions is difficult to dispute.
The absence of organized incident-response capacity could increase the time required to understand and respond to failures, especially when multiple independent actors need to collaborate. The November 2025 chain partition demonstrates that the network can face situations requiring rapid communication, clear responsibilities, and coordination among teams.
This is a relevant argument in favor of funding. Recognition of the need for the function, however, does not automatically justify the proposed budget or establish that Intersect is the only possible structure capable of performing it.
Preservation of institutional knowledge
Intersect has accumulated knowledge of technical, administrative, and governance processes over recent years. Its activities have included upgrade coordination, administration of Treasury initiatives, electoral processes, support for committees and working groups, development of the budget framework, governance processes, repository management, incident response, and coordination among different stakeholders.
An abrupt interruption of these functions could produce loss of continuity and dispersion of institutional knowledge. Even when an institutional structure has problems, replacement requires transition, documentation, redistribution of responsibilities, and clear designation of new responsible actors.
A negative vote should not be interpreted as support for a disorderly interruption of Intersect’s critical functions. It reflects the inadequacy of the submitted request and the insufficiency of the safeguards provided, not a denial of the need for technical coordination or operational continuity.
Open institutional structure and community participation
Intersect maintains a structure of members, committees, and working groups that offers an institutional participation channel for different ecosystem groups.
In principle, this structure can preserve knowledge, facilitate participation by specialists, support the formation of working groups, develop recommendations, connect technical and governance actors, organize elections and participatory processes, and create formal pathways for contribution.
A Member-Based Organization can provide a stable structure for activities that have no single owner.
The abstract validity of this model is not the problem. The problem is the difference between its institutional potential and the quality of the observed results. Organizational structure, nominal participation, and membership figures are not equivalent to effective coordination or results proportional to the resources used.
Nominal reduction from the previous funding cycle
The requested amount was reduced from USD 7.875 million to USD 6.35 million.
This reduction is positive in nominal terms. There is also information that Intersect is implementing cuts, reorganizations, or spending reductions during the current period.
The willingness to reduce costs and seek greater efficiency should be recognized. The proposal also refers to contractor-to-direct-hire conversions, artificial-intelligence tools, more disciplined procurement, membership revenue, and other funding sources.
However, the reduction is partially compositional because some activities were separated from the main request. The lower amount therefore does not necessarily demonstrate an equivalent reduction in operating costs or a proportional efficiency gain.
Without a sufficiently detailed comparison between the previous and current structures, it is not possible to determine which functions were eliminated, which functions were transferred, which positions were reduced, what savings were achieved, which costs remain, which responsibilities were added, how much of the reduction results from actual efficiency, and how much results only from reclassification or separation of scope.
The nominal reduction is positive, but insufficient to demonstrate efficiency.
Audit and formal control mechanisms
The appointment of Appold to provide independent audit and assurance is positive.
Milestone-based drawdowns, fund-management smart contracts, the Oversight Committee, multi-signature requirements, the possible return of unused resources, quarterly reporting, on-chain transaction records, a public dashboard, and controls over transfers and reorganization of resources are also relevant.
These mechanisms reduce certain risks of unilateral use, administrative error, and improper movement of funds.
They do not resolve the principal accountability problem. An audit can evaluate compliance, financial controls, and adherence to the approved mandate. It does not necessarily determine whether the budget was efficient, personnel costs were proportional, reviewers acted independently, or institutional results justified the resources used.
The smart-contract mechanisms mainly control how funds are moved. They do not replace budget granularity, efficiency criteria, staffing transparency, or substantive milestone-review quality.
Negative aspects
Insufficient performance as a Member-Based Organization responsible for coordination
Intersect occupies a central coordination position within the Cardano ecosystem. Its request links funding to the organization of stakeholders, committees, working groups, governance processes, budget processes, and technical activities.
This function must be evaluated through concrete coordination results, not only through the formal existence of structures.
Intersect has not demonstrated sufficient capacity to perform this coordination at a level compatible with its institutional position, budget, and claimed responsibilities.
Committees, groups, meetings, and processes exist, but their existence does not demonstrate that the ecosystem is being coordinated effectively. Relevant measures include the ability to produce clearer decisions, more coherent processes, strategic planning, accountability, improved proposal quality, and greater alignment among stakeholders.
Results in several of these dimensions are unsatisfactory.
Failures in coordination of the budget process
The most strongly grounded criticism concerns the Budget Committee and the budget framework.
My participation in the Budget Committee provided direct observation of limitations that were already visible externally. Intersect should be one of the main structures responsible for organizing strategic resource allocation, coordinating priorities, establishing a credible framework, and improving the quality of ecosystem budget decisions.
Nevertheless, several Treasury Withdrawal Governance Actions continue to be submitted outside the budget framework.
This demonstrates that the process has not consolidated itself as the central coordination mechanism. A framework intended to organize priorities and reduce fragmentation continues to coexist with several parallel funding routes.
Independent submissions are not exclusively Intersect’s responsibility because the protocol permits them. However, a framework with sufficient legitimacy, quality, predictability, and strategic value should reasonably become the predominant and preferred route for budget decisions.
That has not occurred.
The fragmentation affects strategic prioritization, comparison among proposals, management of the Net Change Limit, consolidated visibility over Treasury commitments, identification of duplication, coordination among initiatives, evaluation of aggregate impacts, and medium- and long-term planning.
Intersect requests funding to continue performing this role, but recent experience does not demonstrate that the current model is sufficiently effective.
Insufficiency of the 2026 budget framework
Changes were made between the 2025 and 2026 cycles and should be recognized. The process nevertheless remains far below the standard required for adequate allocation of public Treasury resources.
Sixty-nine proposals were submitted in the 2026 cycle and only eleven advanced. This quantitative filtering may appear rigorous, but the proportion of rejected proposals is not evidence of deliberative quality.
A process can reject many proposals while remaining superficial, inconsistent, or insufficiently transparent.
Public and substantive rationales were not mandatory for every vote. Some participants voluntarily provided explanations, but the system did not ensure that each decision was accompanied by a verifiable justification.
This limits the ability to determine why a proposal was approved or rejected, which criteria were applied, whether those criteria were applied consistently, which problems could be corrected, whether budget, risk, conflicts of interest, and execution capacity were examined, and whether participants performed due diligence.
A process of major financial relevance that permits votes without substantive justification encourages shallow evaluation. It also reduces accountability because it becomes impossible to distinguish an informed decision from a superficial preference.
Weak quality of feedback
The quality of feedback provided during the budget-review process was weak in many cases.
When dozens of proposals compete for Treasury access, the value of the process cannot be limited to producing a final list. It should generate useful information for proposers, dReps, SPOs, ecosystem members, future budget cycles, revision of rejected proposals, and identification of recurring quality standards.
Generic comments, short rationales, and absent justifications do not perform this function.
The lack of substantive feedback also makes it difficult to evaluate the quality of the process itself. It is not possible to determine whether a proposal was rejected for budgetary, strategic, technical, political, procedural, or merely preferential reasons.
Intersect claims a role in coordination and governance improvement, but the design of the process did not impose minimum standards compatible with that responsibility.
A process that encourages superficiality
The problem does not depend only on individual participant behavior. The mechanism itself encourages low-depth evaluations.
When rationales are not mandatory, detailed evaluation provides little additional institutional value compared with an unsupported vote. A participant who spends many hours evaluating a proposal produces formally the same result as someone who votes after minimal consideration.
This creates a negative asymmetry: deep diligence requires time, but the process does not adequately distinguish or value that effort.
An adequate institutional design should require minimum rationales, establish evaluation criteria, preserve decision trails, permit challenges, guarantee transparency, encourage consistency, and make the quality of participation visible.
Without these elements, the budget process risks becoming another political stage rather than a robust strategic-allocation mechanism.
Inability to coordinate an integrated budget strategy
There is insufficient evidence that Intersect’s coordination layer is producing a truly integrated budget strategy.
Treasury allocation continues through separate initiatives, proposals, and processes. There is insufficient clarity regarding aggregate priorities, trade-offs among areas, recommended limits by category, duplication analysis, dependencies among proposals, future resource availability, and strategic distribution among infrastructure, governance, adoption, community, and sustainability.
The budget framework should reduce this fragmentation. It has not achieved that objective to a satisfactory degree.
Different evidentiary limits across committees
The criticisms of different committees do not have the same evidentiary basis.
There is direct experience and internal knowledge concerning the Budget Committee. The objections related to it therefore have a stronger foundation.
There are observations concerning the results, speed, and outputs of the Civics Committee and Product Committee, but knowledge of their internal operations is more limited.
There are recurring public criticisms of the Membership and Community Committee reported by third parties, but insufficient basis to validate all of them.
No critical problems were identified in the technical committees, especially the Technical Steering Committee, but there is also insufficient information for a deep evaluation.
Perceptions, third-party reports, and partial knowledge should not be transformed into categorical conclusions.
Membership and Community Committee
Participants in the ecosystem have raised criticisms concerning the historical performance of the Membership and Community Committee, particularly its ability to improve the membership, participation, and engagement experience.
These criticisms appear recurrent and have been expressed publicly. There is not enough direct knowledge to independently confirm all allegations.
The MCC’s performance should therefore not serve as an isolated or determinative basis for the vote. It provides an additional signal that the coordination problems observed in the Budget Committee may not be confined to one structure.
The exact extent of the problems and Intersect’s specific responsibility remain Unknown, although the existing criticism deserves consideration.
Civics Committee and slow governance evolution
Governance and civics work appears to be progressing more slowly than necessary.
Cardano has a new, complex, and still-developing governance system. Caution, consultation, consensus-building, and institutional review are naturally required. Not all problems can be resolved quickly.
Complexity cannot indefinitely justify limited delivery capacity.
Intersect is one of the entities responsible for facilitating coordination, process development, and institutional evolution. Many important issues nevertheless remain without sufficient progress, and the processes appear excessively slow.
The Civics Committee and Intersect do not possess authority to impose decisions on the Cardano ecosystem. The proposal correctly states that Intersect is not a decision-making authority over Cardano governance.
Facilitation does not mean absence of responsibility.
An entity funded to coordinate should be able to organize discussions, establish timelines, structure proposals, identify pending decisions, publish options, record disagreements, bring matters to an institutional conclusion, and facilitate the conversion of discussions into concrete action.
The absence of formal authority does not eliminate responsibility for the quality of coordination.
Product Committee and delayed operationalization of Cardano Vision 2030
The Product Committee’s work on Cardano Vision 2030 is important. A shared strategic vis
- Yes81.2K ₳No rationale
- YesChanged65.9K ₳History
Earlier votes
No1mo agoSuperseded
- No62.7K ₳No rationale
- Abstain56.4K ₳Rationale
I chose to ABSTAIN from voting on this proposal
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