Withdraw ₳605,000 for A free Native Asset CDN for Cardano Developers
211 DReps voted · 69 with a rationale · 29 changed their vote
Open a row to read the rationale.
- No383K ₳No rationale
- Yes381.1K ₳No rationale
- Yes365.7K ₳No rationale
- No328.9K ₳No rationale
- Yes314.4K ₳Rationale
In alignment with my voting during the 2025 Cardano Budget Reconciliation process on the Ekklesia platform, I support this withdrawal and therefore vote YES.
In alignment with my voting during the 2025 Cardano Budget Reconciliation process on the Ekklesia platform, I support this withdrawal and therefore vote YES.
- Yes313.4K ₳Rationale
I’m voting YES on this proposal as it aligns with my principles of supporting sustainable development, ecosystem resilience, and community-driven innovation within Cardano. The proposal presents a clear rationale, contributes meaningfully to the network’s growth, and includes oversight mechanisms that help ensure responsible use of treasury funds.
I support moving forward with funding that strengthens Cardano’s long-term foundations and reflects the community’s shared goals.
- YesChanged298.9K ₳Rationale
Changing vote from NO to YES after brief exchange with nftcdn over twitter DMs. They were convincing. Addressing metadata standard fragmentation will help developers. I am no longer confident in my previous criticism and am defaulting to YES on the basis that I don't believe we should block treasury withdrawals for an approved budget without a specific grievance.
Earlier votes
No11mo agoSuperseded
I don't see the need for this. Why does the cardano ecosystem need its own CDN?
- YesChanged271.8K ₳History
Earlier votes
No11mo agoSuperseded
- YesChanged270.1K ₳Rationale
I am now voting YES on this proposal after further direct engagement with the proposer and gaining additional context that meaningfully changes my assessment.
Direct communication to address concerns — The proposer reached out to me personally to clarify the intent, constraints, and future vision for NFTCDN. This responsiveness, determination, and willingness to address questions directly has increased my confidence in their commitment to delivering genuine value to the Cardano ecosystem.
Context of the first-ever voting round — Given that this is our first treasury voting cycle and the submission process was flawed (no definitive guidelines, inconsistent formatting, no pre-vote vetting, and incomplete info capture), I believe significant leeway is warranted when evaluating initial proposals. Early votes are as much about establishing process and gathering operational data as they are about perfecting proposals.
Existing gap in operational data and reporting — The Cardano ecosystem currently lacks consolidated operational usage metrics, cost baselines, and infrastructure demand data that would allow for accurate long-term planning. This proposal can help fill that gap by capturing concrete adoption and performance data from real-world usage.
Lowering barriers for developer experimentation — One of the largest constraints to grassroots and professional developer growth is the cost/time required to produce a working Proof of Concept or prototype. NFTCDN’s free-tier access for 18 months could meaningfully reduce these barriers, enabling more developers to bring long-imagined projects to life and test market viability without the upfront infrastructure burden.
Reframing as R&D and ecosystem requirements gathering — Initially, I saw this as a private SaaS expansion play. After discussion with the proposer, I now see it as a development research and requirement validation initiative, where the output includes usage metrics, demand analysis, and integration feedback that can inform future infrastructure planning. This shift in perspective addresses my original concerns about vendor lock-in and sustainability.
Appropriateness of scope and cost — The budget request aligns with the scope of work and anticipated outputs. If the initiative delivers the expected adoption data, operational performance reports, and developer integration insights at this price point, it will represent good value for the treasury as an R&D investment.
For these reasons, I now support this proposal as a strategically relevant initiative to gather critical ecosystem data, lower developer onboarding costs, and inform future infrastructure funding decisions. While I still expect that future proposals evolve toward open-source, distributed governance models, the unique context of this first cycle and the concrete commitments from the proposer make this a worthwhile and timely investment.
For additional context and future reference I am leaving my original No vote rationale below as I am not entirely sure how the voting data and rationale relationships are maintained and would hate for any potentially relevant information to get lost. Original No vote: I am voting NO on this proposal, as it does not meet the standards for open, sustainable, and community-owned infrastructure that Cardano’s treasury should prioritize. While content delivery for native asset metadata and media is a legitimate need, this solution is centralized, proprietary, and insufficiently transparent regarding both budget and long-term sustainability. Funding a single vendor to provide a non-critical CDN on a closed-source, commercial basis risks lock-in, undermines decentralization, and sets a precedent for treasury-funded private SaaS subsidies. The proposal’s claimed cost savings and ROI are not supported by detailed technical or financial disclosures, and the reliance on a free period followed by uncertain pricing leaves projects exposed if future funding is denied or terms change. Additionally, current ecosystem adoption is limited, and similar functionality can be achieved with more open and competitively priced alternatives. I encourage resubmission of a leaner, open-source, and community-governed proposal, developed transparently and collaboratively, before treasury support is reconsidered.Earlier votes
No11mo agoSuperseded
I am voting NO on this proposal, as it does not meet the standards for open, sustainable, and community-owned infrastructure that Cardano’s treasury should prioritize.
While content delivery for native asset metadata and media is a legitimate need, this solution is centralized, proprietary, and insufficiently transparent regarding both budget and long-term sustainability. Funding a single vendor to provide a non-critical CDN on a closed-source, commercial basis risks lock-in, undermines decentralization, and sets a precedent for treasury-funded private SaaS subsidies.
The proposal’s claimed cost savings and ROI are not supported by detailed technical or financial disclosures, and the reliance on a free period followed by uncertain pricing leaves projects exposed if future funding is denied or terms change. Additionally, current ecosystem adoption is limited, and similar functionality can be achieved with more open and competitively priced alternatives.
I encourage resubmission of a leaner, open-source, and community-governed proposal, developed transparently and collaboratively, before treasury support is reconsidered.
- Yes262.6K ₳No rationale
- Yes252.9K ₳No rationale
- No245.5K ₳No rationale
- No238.8K ₳Rationale
Misaligned priorities and private venture subsidy: While NFTCDN aims to simplify native asset display, its focus on NFTs risks steering Cardano toward a speculative, Solana-like ecosystem, prioritizing niche use cases over robust, mission-critical applications like DeFi or scaling solutions. The Cardano ecosystem, post-Voltaire and amidst upgrades like Hydra and Leios, needs consolidation to stabilize core infrastructure before investing in supplementary tools.Moreover, NFTCDN, a private venture with a proven paid model since 2022, should seek private investment rather than public treasury funds. The proposal lacks clarity on sustainability post-18 months and fails to demonstrate broad community benefits beyond NFT-focused projects, which may not align with Cardano’s 2025 roadmap priorities of scalability and governance. With 39 competing proposals, resources should prioritize initiatives with clear, ecosystem-wide impact. I recommend deferring this until Cardano’s core systems are further solidified.
- Abstain208.3K ₳No rationale
- Yes200.5K ₳No rationale
- No196.1K ₳No rationale
- Abstain191.1K ₳No rationale
- Yes185.6K ₳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.
- Abstain178.9K ₳No rationale
- No166.4K ₳Rationale
Voting no because we don't have 3rd party analysis of whether the ROI figures are attainable and we would really like to see a decentralized ecosystem for backend storage composed of many providers instead of a single treasury funded entity.
✅ Pros
Significant Cost and Time Savings: The proposal claims that building similar infrastructure in-house costs a project ~$100,000 and takes over 9 months. By funding this service, the community avoids these costs for every project that uses it. The vendor projects a total ecosystem cost avoidance of ~$5.5 million, representing a Return on Investment (ROI) of over 17x.Established and Proven Technology: NFTCDN isn't a new idea; it's an existing business that has been operating since 2022. It already serves major projects like Eternl, pool.pm, and NMKR, has handled over 800 million API requests, and reports 100% uptime. This track record significantly reduces the risk of funding a non-viable product.
Lowers Barriers to Entry & Boosts Innovation: By making this critical infrastructure free, the proposal aims to empower smaller, unfunded, or early-stage development teams. This allows them to focus on their core product and user experience rather than complex backend operations, potentially leading to faster innovation and more dApps on Cardano.
Purpose-Built for Cardano's Needs: This is not a generic CDN like Cloudflare. NFTCDN is specifically designed to work with Cardano's native assets. It automatically handles various storage protocols (IPFS, Arweave, on-chain), supports evolving standards (CIP-25, CIP-68), and provides access to asset data using just the asset's fingerprint, which drastically simplifies development.
Robust Governance and Fund Management: The funds are not being sent directly to the vendor's wallet. They will be managed by Intersect through audited smart contracts with an Oversight Committee composed of trusted entities (Sundae Labs, Cardano Foundation, Dquadrant, Xerberus, NMKR). This provides a strong framework for accountability and reduces the risk of misusing treasury funds.
❌ Cons
Introduces a Centralized Point of Failure: While the assets themselves remain on decentralized storage, dApps using this service become reliant on NFTCDN's infrastructure. If NFTCDN were to experience downtime, it could impact the display of native assets across many applications simultaneously.Funding a For-Profit Entity's Operations: This proposal asks the decentralized treasury to cover the operational costs of a private, for-profit company. This sets a precedent and raises philosophical questions about whether the treasury should subsidize private businesses, even if it provides a public good.
Uncertain Long-Term Sustainability: The funding covers 18 months of free service. It's unclear what happens afterward. Will NFTCDN revert to a paid model, potentially "locking in" the projects that have come to rely on it? Or will they return to the treasury for another round of funding? The proposal lacks a clear plan for sustainability beyond the funding period.
Reliance on Vendor-Provided Estimates: The impressive ROI and cost-saving figures (~$5.5M) are based on the vendor's own internal benchmarks and estimations. While they seem plausible, they are not independently verified. The actual value and savings delivered to the ecosystem may differ from these projections.
Potential to Stifle Competition: By officially funding a single provider for this service, the treasury could be "picking a winner." This might discourage other developers or companies from creating competing or potentially better solutions, centralizing this piece of core infrastructure around a single, treasury-funded entity.
- NoRevoted147.5K ₳History
Earlier votes
No11mo agoSuperseded
- Abstain138.4K ₳No rationale
- Yes137.4K ₳No rationale
- Yes133.7K ₳No rationale
- Abstain131.9K ₳No rationale
- Yes110.9K ₳No rationale
- Yes108.3K ₳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. - Yes105.8K ₳No rationale
- Yes103.1K ₳No rationale
- YesChanged92.6K ₳History
Earlier votes
Abstain1y agoSuperseded
- Yes89.9K ₳No rationale
- Abstain89.7K ₳No rationale
- No65.7K ₳No rationale
- No58.6K ₳No rationale
- No55.9K ₳No rationale
- Yes53.8K ₳No rationale
- No50.5K ₳No rationale
- Yes49.7K ₳Rationale
This funds a public-good developer service—free native-asset CDN access for 18 months—that meaningfully reduces time-to-market and infra cost across many apps; the ask (₳605k) is proportionate and comes with Intersect oversight.
Key risks to monitor (and mitigate contractually):
Vendor lock-in/single point of failure—require open, portable APIs, permissive-licensed SDKs, data-export, and multi-region/multi-provider redundancy.
Sustainability after the free period—publish post-18-month pricing, a migration/exit plan, and a durable free tier; verifiability—public metrics (requests, unique projects, cache-hit, latency, 99.9%+ uptime), monthly reports, and an on-chain dashboard.
Integrity/censorship resistance—serve exactly what on-chain metadata points to (no rewriting) with deterministic resolution rules; security & content safety—malware scanning, DDoS/abuse controls, and transparent copyright/illegal-content takedown policy; standards alignment—full support for CIP-25/68/v0.01 and forward-compatibility; decentralization balance—encourage IPFS/Arweave pinning and community mirrors; privacy/compliance—GDPR/CCPA-aware logging and minimization.
Fairness—access guarantees for small/early builders; and accountability—milestone-tied SLAs, open incident postmortems, and independent third-party uptime verification.
Aligned with Articles III/IV so long as these guardrails are embedded in the legal contract and reported transparently. - Yes49.6K ₳No rationale
- Yes48.6K ₳No rationale
- Yes46.5K ₳No rationale
- No45.2K ₳No rationale
- Yes36.3K ₳No rationale
- Yes36.3K ₳Rationale
✅ Voted YES on the NFTCDN Treasury Withdrawal Proposal
🖼️ Why I support it:
• Eliminates one of the biggest pain points for Cardano builders: media delivery for native assets (NFTs/FTs)
• Makes NFTCDN free for all developers for 18 months — accelerating innovation and adoption
• Saves an estimated $5.5M+ in ecosystem costs and ~39,000 developer hours
• Already powering major dApps like Eternl, NMKR, NEWM, Pool.pm with 800M+ API calls served
• Directly aligns with Cardano’s 2025 goals: improving dev experience, app performance, and time-to-marketA purpose-built, plug-and-play native asset CDN is a force multiplier for the entire Cardano ecosystem. This is the type of foundational infra that supports real growth.
Track all my votes 👉 tempo.vote/drep-profile
DRep: DeepStatecraft - Yes26.7K ₳Rationale
For NFT people like me, this helps a lot and it is inexpensive. Yes.
- Yes23.1K ₳No rationale
- Yes15.2K ₳No rationale
- No14.3K ₳No rationale
- YesRevoted8.7K ₳History
Earlier votes
Yes11mo agoSuperseded
Agree with concept. It will aid new projects.
A PDF version of this rationale is also made available.
Agree with concept. It will aid new projects.
- Abstain8.3K ₳No rationale