Budget Proposal Review workshop (Core) – Western Hemisphere, Summary
Core Infrastructure and Governance
🏗️ The Technical Steering Committee (TSC) proposes 82M ADA for 12 months to cover core infrastructure maintenance, roadmap activity, and a 1.5x increase in the 2024 core dev team.
🔍 Core infrastructure proposals are evaluated on importance, technical quality, appropriateness of effort, team quality, value for money, and commitment, with a focus on technical quality over financial cost.
🔐 Proposals must be open source, transparent, allow feedback, avoid long-term financial benefits to specific entities, and provide low barriers to inclusion and educational opportunities.
Stablecoin and DeFi Initiatives
💱 A 48 million ADA budget is proposed for a decentralised, diversified stablecoin index composed of DJED, USDA, USDM, and USDC to address limited liquidity depth and enable high-volume, low-margin business models.
🏦 The Maze stablecoin index proposal requests 2 million ADA to bootstrap the fund, with 40,000 ADA for operational costs, aiming to simplify stablecoin use and enable treasury management for the Cardano DeFi ecosystem.
Hardware Wallet and Explorer Development
🔒 Bakum Labs proposes ongoing hardware wallet maintenance for Ledger and Trezor, requiring 0.6 FTE for new features and 0.2 FTE for support, with a 35K audit budget.
🔍 C Explorer, a developer-focused Cardano blockchain explorer with 30-50K monthly users, requests 266K ADA over 18 months to improve performance, reduce ad reliance, and keep APIs free.
Technical Improvements and Testing
🧪 The PARS protocol proposal aims to improve settlement guarantees under adverse conditions by implementing the first stage, enabling a sensible test net for community engagement.
📊 The canonical ledger state proposal defines a standard format for storing ledger states, enabling conformance testing between nodes to ensure interoperability.
🕵️ The block hoarding node proposal collects and analyses adversarial behaviour by monitoring all transactions, enabling post-mortem analysis of node and adversarial behaviour.
Community and Developer Support
👨💻 The maintainer retainer program ensures a sustainable pool of experienced developers for long-term stewardship of 50 essential repositories, with 50% focused on core Cardano and 50% on community-nominated projects.
🛠️ The tooling sustainability program provides resources for project identification, community feedback, integration, and ongoing monitoring to keep critical open-source libraries and tools essential to the Cardano system long-term sustained.
🔐 Security and incident response initiatives include a bug bounty program for ethical hackers, 24/7 monitoring, incident detection, and mitigation of security incidents in the Cardano ecosystem.
Decentralisation and Infrastructure
🌐 The decentralisation of the Block Frost API proposal incentivises SPOs and Cardano operators to share infrastructure, rewarding them with query revenue to reduce reliance on centralised providers.
💰 SPO earnings are currently a minimum of $20/month for a single node, with potential for increased earnings based on request volume.
Indigenous DAO Toolkit
🌿 The Indigenous DAO toolkit aims to onboard large communities with a value of billions by providing tools for collective decision-making, registration systems, and digital identities, with a $2.2M ADA budget, primarily for personnel costs.
🏗️ The toolkit proposes a four-layer infrastructure with a core identity and relationship protocol, enabling interoperability. It plans to build wallets, dashboards, and treasury apps on top of these core services.
💼 The Indigenous DAO toolkit plans to explore revenue models for sustainability, such as transaction fees and subscription models for DAO tooling, while focusing on community training and resource provision.
