Budget Proposal Review workshop (Governance, Research & No Category) – Western Hemisphere Summary
Governance and Budget Process
🗳️ Cardano’s 2025 budget process involves two phases: proposal submission/review and reconciliation, with 14 proposals currently under review in governance, research, and uncategorized categories.
💼 The Cardano Civics Committee’s 2025 roadmap focuses on accessible governance, fair stewardship, and transparent facilitation, including ratifying the constitution and upcoming elections for the constitutional committee.
🌐 Cardano’s 2030 vision and 2026 roadmap will be co-created through 100+ global workshops and surveys, with public review, iteration, and on-chain ratification.
Research and Development
🔬 15 research initiatives will study user attention, onboarding friction, developer needs, catalyst funding gaps, and global brand awareness to guide Cardano’s roadmap and governance.
🖥️ Node diversity is a key priority for achieving product-market fit for Cardano, identifying protocol feature needs and facilitating their development.
🧠 Faurek aims to position Cardano as a leader in decentralised AI by accelerating Layer 2 capabilities and providing AI services to communities.
Transparency and Accountability
📊 ADA Spend, inspired by USAspending.gov, will be a fully open-source Cardano treasury explorer tracking fund allocation and utilisation through data collection, analysis, and visualisation.
🔍 Ada Start, a Cardano blockchain explorer since 2019, proposes to continue development for 24 months, including performance optimisations and governance-related features.
🤖 Voltater plans to leverage AI tools for read-only memory to verify work, ensure Mika compliance, and provide neutral arbitration beyond peer reporting.
Community and Ecosystem Development
🌍 The Governance Workstream Consortium, formed by 63 delegates from over 50 countries, aims to tackle future work streams identified during the Cardano Constitution Convention.
🌱 WAD’s 6-month project across 13 African countries aims to establish a community-wide vision for Cardano’s future from 2025 to 2030.
🏗️ To help Cardano find product-market fit, insights will be gathered from Web2 and Web3 developers on what would make building on Cardano easier.
Research and Innovation
🔬 Input Output commits to deliver 20 research and six technology validated outputs annually over 5 years, totalling 100 research and 30 validated technology outputs.
📚 Input Output’s Oraoris research, with papers published since 2017 and 3,000 citations for early papers, has catalysed an ecosystem of millions of users and tens of billions in valuation.
💡 The Cardano privacy layer proposal by Model B and Encoins aims to develop a base privacy protocol with applications like voting, identity, mixing, and a decentralised relay network.
Staking and Infrastructure
💾 Cardano SPOs operating at a 40% loss could be empowered through new revenue sources like decentralised storage using Lattis technology, a superior alternative to Filecoin/Arweave.
🔗 Lattis, a decentralised storage network, requires lower hardware than blockchain and enables streaming, providing transparency, redundancy, and resiliency.
Community Empowerment and Education
🤝 The 45B proposal aims to empower detached Cardano communities by nurturing relationships, incubating self-organising cohorts, and routing 50% of the budget to participating communities.
🎓 The proposal includes themed events for onboarding various industries and hands-on Cardano use sessions for all communities.
DRep Incentivization and Governance Improvement
💰 The DR incentivization proposal aims to address DREP workload and concentration of power by collecting on-chain behaviour data for a year to create an open-source reward formula.
📈 The governance improvement process involves curiosity-driven research through interviews and on-chain data analysis, followed by workshops for prioritising and refining recommendations.
🔄 The conceptualisation phase of the Cardano research project requires $41,000 to gather wide-ranging data on current DRep behaviour and identify meaningful parameters for representative rewards.
