Budget Proposal Review workshop (Core) – Eastern Hemisphere, Summary
Governance and Funding
🏛️ The Technical Steering Committee (TSC) evaluates proposals based on core infrastructure maintenance, technical quality, team quality, and value for money, prioritising open-source, transparent, and community-inclusive projects.
💰 TSC proposal requests 82M ADA ($41M) budget for 12 months to cover 112 FTEs for essential Cardano infrastructure maintenance and roadmap activities.
🔄 Proposals not passing the first reconciliation cycle (April 26-28) can be reviewed in the second cycle (May 3-4) or routed to other funding mechanisms like Project Catalyst or Builder DAO.
Technical Development
🔧 Cardano continuity includes approved technical services to build, fix, and improve current and future blockchain areas, such as SIP 1694 governance software, component upgrades, and testing improvements.
📊 Project Idos blueprints initiative creates templates for developers to build their nodes, promoting decentralisation without requiring unique IOE knowledge.
🛠️ Scalos, an open-source full-stack development platform for Cardano, accelerates dApp development by simplifying tooling and providing libraries for JVM and JavaScript platforms.
Open Source and Community Initiatives
🐛 Open Source Committee budget proposal includes a maintainer retainer program, a tooling sustainability program, and a bug bounty program for ongoing issue resolution.
👨💻 The developer advocate program plans a new cohort of 4 developers for outreach and growth, while the accelerated research program supports sustainable business model projects.
🔐 Incident monitoring and security funds 1-2 highly experienced developers to fix critical chain issues within 24-72 hours.
Specific Tools and Technologies
🧰 MLABS seeks funding for maintenance and feature development of core tools like Blueark, Cardano Transaction Library, Atlas PAB, Cardano Ledger Emulator, and Cardano.nix.
⚡ Blueark, a Haskell EDSL, performs more efficiently than Plutus in many cases, enabling performative scripts and optimisations.
🌐 The Cardano Transaction Library provides a pure script framework for building browser-based transactions, offering more portability than PAB solutions.
Long-term Strategy and Ecosystem Growth
🔬 Scalos targets R&D labs and businesses entering the Cardano ecosystem, aiming to improve the development experience for JVM languages like Java, Scala, and Kotlin.
📈 TSC proposal ensures long-term stability for the Cardano ecosystem by providing certainty on maintenance and development plans to users, developers, and investors.
🌍 TSC approach encourages competition, avoids cartel-like behaviour, ensures transparency, and allows small suppliers to enter the ecosystem, establishing a coherent long-term program under community direction.
