The ₳300M Cardano spending limit fails, opposed as too tight and as still too loose

The ₳300M proposal would cut the agreed spending ceiling by ₳50M

Both proposals for the spending limit of epochs 613 to 713 start from the ₳306.9M the treasury took in during 2025, across epochs 532 to 604. The ₳350M ceiling agreed in the window before sets the limit at about 115% of that figure, and its document says the room above the inflows was included for the ₳50M stablecoin liquidity budget approved in 2025 and not yet drawn on. Net Change Limit of 300 Million ADA for Epochs 613 to 713 sets the limit slightly below the inflows and says it would supersede any limit previously agreed for the period. A request for the first withdrawal from the liquidity budget, Cardano Defi Liquidity Budget - Withdrawal 1 for ₳800,000 to set up the legal entity and audit the contract the budget needs, was filed in epoch 617 while the lower ceiling was still being voted on.

Voting on the lower ceiling closed at the start of epoch 618. The tally was 118 yes votes, 42 no and 13 abstain. Yes votes carried ₳2.46B and the no votes ₳1.71B, but the yes side held 44.1% of DRep power, because abstaining power is left out and power that did not vote counts as no.

Yoroi, EMURGO and the Eternl DRep Committee voted no to keep the room, Dave to cut it further

The three largest DReps on the no side wanted the room kept. Yoroi W₳llet wrote that reducing the ceiling “may be premature”, that discipline should come from alignment with the 2030 targets, “proposal-level scrutiny, and milestone-based controls rather than by tightening the structural ceiling itself”, and that in a lower ada price environment the same costs in dollars require more ada. EMURGO wrote that the limit “is a ceiling, not a spending mandate” and that tightening it “does not in itself improve spending quality or accountability”. The Eternl DRep Committee wrote that a new limit can always be voted on and that ₳350M for the same period was already in place. At epoch 620 those three held ₳1.28B in delegated power between them. AdaStat voted no for the same reason, that a higher limit “reduces the risk of rejecting strong proposals just because of an arbitrary limit”.

Some no votes wanted a lower figure than ₳300M. Dave wrote that ₳300M “is still excessive” and advocated ₳200M to ₳250M to force prioritisation. hix_coffeepool☕️ recommended ₳200M or less, because the outcome of the 2025 budget had not been reviewed. On the yes side, YUTA wrote that the ada price had fallen “by nearly 30%” since the ₳350M ceiling was proposed on 10 January 2026, which called for stricter budget priorities. The Cardano Foundation wrote that ₳300M “falls within our margin of acceptance” because it roughly matches the 2025 inflows and the ecosystem “ran a deficit” in the 2025 cycle, while still holding the ₳350M limit to be constitutionally valid, and it urged the committee to say whether a committee vote on a ceiling is needed at all.

A net change limit requires support from more than half of the active voting stake, a requirement the treasury guardrails set and a published account of this vote names. At 44.1% the lower ceiling did not reach it, so the ₳350M agreed for epochs 613 to 713 remains the limit in force, and the six committee yes votes on this proposal change nothing about that.

Delegation to DReps peaks at ₳5.87B in epoch 618, inside a flat stretch

At epoch 618 the power delegated to DReps stood at ₳5.87B, the highest reading since epoch 508. It is a small movement in a flat stretch rather than an event: ₳5.83B at epoch 615, ₳5.87B at 618, ₳5.83B again at 620.

The largest decline listed is the Cardano Foundation DRep, down ₳56.7M from ₳188.0M to ₳131.3M between epochs 614 and 620, measured across the whole window and not at epoch 618.

Amaru is ratified, KtorZ abstains as one of its proposers

The treasury paid nothing in the six epochs, and its balance rose by ₳19.3M between the readings at epoch 615 and epoch 620, from ₳1.64B to ₳1.66B. Nothing had yet been drawn against the new spending period.

Amaru Treasury Withdrawal 2026 was ratified at the start of epoch 620 with 70.9% of DRep power, on 136 yes votes to 16 no. The stored committee tally holds five yes votes and one abstention, one of the yes votes recorded during epoch 620, after the ratification boundary. The abstention was KtorZ, who wrote that he is one of the proposers and stepped aside over the apparent conflict of interest. The request asks ₳10.1M for a second year of work on Amaru, the independently built block producing node whose first ₳1.5M was the first payment ever made out of the treasury. The step from ₳1.5M to ₳10.1M is the difference between funding the scopes that nothing else covered and funding a full year of the project. The document prices that year at fifty cents per ada and counts January and February 2026 into it after the fact, because, it says, the request had been held back until a spending limit with room for it was in place. It promises a relay capable node in the first quarter and a block producing node by the middle of the year, and puts the money under the project’s own maintainer committee, paid out through a smart contract that can return unspent contingency to the treasury.

The Cardano Foundation wrote that the maintainers had returned “over 920,000 unspent ada” at the close of their 2025 budget, which “sets a benchmark for integrity”, and that their work had already uncovered bugs that could have affected the main network. YUTA wrote that in a bearish market treasury spending “must be evaluated with particular caution”, and that the node is “a structural security investment” all the same. The Eternl DRep Committee closed with three words, let them cook. The request was ratified inside this window and had not been paid at its close.

Five new requests

Five proposals arrived during the window and were still open at its close: three withdrawals asking for ₳57.7M together, Cardano Budget Process Framework (facilitated by Intersect), filed in epoch 616, and Approve Cardano Foundation as New Managing Entity of Project Catalyst, filed in epoch 619. The largest withdrawal is ₳50M for Cardano x Draper Dragon: Orion Fund, filed in epoch 618 as the first tranche of an investment fund whose document sizes the long term plan at $80M or more, up to $75M of it from the treasury across three separately approved tranches, this first one included, over six to eight years. The other two came in epoch 617 with deadlines at the start of epoch 624: the ₳800,000 liquidity draw above, and Dingo: a Production-Grade Block Producer in Go by Blink Labs, ₳6.9M for twelve months of work on a block producing node written in Go, which its document places next to Amaru as a second independent implementation.

Across the six epochs DReps cast 709 votes, committee members 24 and pools 55, superseded votes included. The 788 votes include final votes from 180 DReps and 21 pools.