Nine Cardano treasury requests submitted together, six paid

Nine requests, one transaction

Nine treasury requests shared a transaction and a deadline. They were submitted together in epoch 626, and their voting closed at the start of epoch 633. The Constitutional Committee, which votes only on whether an action is constitutional, found no fault with any of the nine, seven yes votes each. Seven of the nine were filed by Input Output, alone or with a partner firm, and each names Intersect to hold the money and release it against milestones, with anything unspent going back to the treasury. Blockfrost and Pogun filed the other two.

Six were ratified and paid one epoch later, ₳131.5M together in epoch 634. IO: Consensus Initiative drew the strongest support of the nine at 88.0% of DRep power, ₳27.7M to take the Leios throughput upgrade from its public testnet to a release candidate. IO: Cardano Upgrades took 86.4% for account addresses that can receive direct deposits, the design of a treasury able to hold stablecoins, and paying transaction fees in assets other than ada. The largest sum, ₳62.1M for the maintenance programme run with Ensurable Systems, nine areas from bug fixing and security reviews to release management, took 82.3%. The narrowest pass was IO: Developer Experience Initiative at 67.9%, less than a point over the 67% a withdrawal needs, and the smallest request in the set at ₳3.6M.

Three expired, and together they had asked for ₳30.6M. Pogun reached 35.7% for a bitcoin lending market, a yield layer and a bridge, with a promise to return 20% of its earnings to the treasury until the funding is repaid and 5% after that. Midgard Labs reached 31.4% for layer two scaling work, the hardening of Hydra and an optimistic rollup. Blockfrost reached 24.2% for an indexer that would let an operator serve a slice of the chain and a subsidy for its free tier. The three that expired received at most 35.7% of DRep power, the six paid ones at least 67.9%.

Why Yoroi and EMURGO changed their votes on Developer Experience

The Eternl DRep Committee published a single rationale for all of them, a checklist with a yes, a no or an abstain against each title. It backed the consensus work and the maintenance programme and voted no on the scaling plan and on the developer experience request that the DReps as a whole let through.

Yoroi and EMURGO changed from abstain to yes on the Developer Experience request. Yoroi W₳llet wrote that it was revising its earlier abstention to a yes on the developer experience request because developer experience is time sensitive and a further delay would be material, and that its yes on the VacuumLabs Plutus work was also a change from an earlier abstention. EMURGO wrote the same on the developer experience request, adding that “the proposal has not changed” and that it did not withdraw its concerns about attribution and third party coordination. At 67.9% the request had less than a point to spare.

YUTA voted no on the scaling plan, writing that Hydra “makes up 80% of this proposal”, had received significant investment in the past, and that it was “hard to envision a future” in which it drives transaction volume. On Blockfrost, YUTA wrote that the service is better positioned as one competing with other providers than as a public service, and Yoroi and EMURGO abstained on it and on Pogun over the structure of the requests and the scale of the commitment. Sebastien Guillemot セバ abstained on Pogun with one line: he likes many of the ideas, but generally abstains on commercial proposals.

Abstaining power leaves the count, while delegated power that did not vote stays in it as no. On each of the three that expired more power voted against than for, and the abstaining power was roughly equal to the power voting no: on Blockfrost ₳2.12B voted no, the heaviest opposition cast anywhere in the nine.

Singapore: baseline sponsorship approved, Summit funding falls short

Two events in Singapore were up for a vote: the TOKEN2049 conference, where EMURGO asked for a sponsorship package for Cardano, and the Cardano Summit, the Cardano Foundation’s own event, for which it asked ₳7.8M. The three requests had started life as one bundle that expired in epoch 630, told in the review of epochs 630 to 632. The Baseline Sponsorship asked for ₳3.3M for Cardano’s presence at TOKEN2049 at a tier one step below the bundle, and was paid at epoch 635 on 70.2%. The Sponsorship Upgrade asked for ₳1.77M more for extras at the same conference, the higher tier, a larger booth and a keynote slot, and reached 27.3%. The Cardano Summit request came closest of anything that expired, finishing at 65.1%, about 1.9 percentage points short, on 129 yes votes against 61. The DReps paid for the presence at the conference and not for the extras, and the Cardano Summit request received no treasury funding.

The three requests came from two organisations that also act as DReps, EMURGO and the Cardano Foundation, and both wrote about it. EMURGO, the proposer of the baseline sponsorship, wrote that its “initial position was to abstain, recognising the conflict of interest that comes with voting on a proposal we” submitted, and voted yes after changes to the proposal. Yoroi, which describes itself as a related entity, wrote that its first inclination had been to abstain and that EMURGO had since “waived its 15% management fee in full”. The Cardano Foundation, the proposer of the revised summit request, abstained on it, writing that it had not sufficiently engaged with the community before the first proposal, and KtorZ abstained on the same request as an employee of the Cardano Foundation.

The others drew the line between the baseline and the rest. The Eternl DRep Committee abstained on the Cardano Summit request and the upgrade, writing that Singapore in that week “is exceptionally expensive”, that Cardano must be at the conference, and that it did not want to stand in the way by voting no. YUTA voted no on the upgrade because the proposal did not show that a larger keynote and booth make a significant difference.

The durian request finishes at 0.8%

The clearest no of the window went to a request for ₳2.4M to trace individual durians grown in Vietnam without a physical label on each fruit. It drew 8 yes votes against 132 and expired at 0.8%, with Phil_uplc the only committee member for it and five against, the only action decided in these three epochs that a majority of the committee opposed, on the procedural requirements for a withdrawal. The Cardano Foundation voted no because the request “seeks a non-refundable grant for a private commercial venture”, and encouraged a resubmission structured as a loan.

Tweag files a smaller request before the first one expires

Tweag asked for ₳39.8M for seventeen work packages of core infrastructure over two years, chief among them bringing the Peras finality upgrade to the main network, and expired at 6.1%, on 44 yes votes against 85. The Cardano Foundation voted no over “the bundled two-year scope, unresolved 2025 delivery, and insufficient budget transparency” and encouraged a leaner resubmission. Before the request expired at the start of epoch 635, a second one from Tweag had been submitted in epoch 634, for ₳18.3M over one year, keeping three of the seventeen packages. Two other withdrawals were paid at the start of epoch 635: the baseline sponsorship, and ₳4.6M for Pebble, twelve months of work on a smart contract language and the TypeScript libraries other Cardano toolkits build on, at 69.3%, itself a smaller second request after a larger one had expired in epoch 628.

The treasury at its lowest point so far

The treasury reading was ₳1.64B at the start of epoch 633 and ₳1.51B at the start of epoch 635, a fall of ₳131.8M, and that second reading was lower than any since epoch 508. By epoch 635 twelve withdrawals had used ₳207.3M of the ₳350M limit for epochs 613 to 713, most of it in the six paid in epoch 634. Across the window DReps cast 1,070 votes and committee members 54, superseded votes included, and 204 DReps cast a final vote.