Reforming Cardano Treasury Governance
2026-06-11
Published June 2026 by RCADA DRep
We’ve been thinking about Cardano’s treasury governance problems for a while, and the recent “Reforming Treasury Governance” Info Action from fellow DRep AtlasHub (gov_action1t5ap7etluvct2x69nj5mfqhurgakuvekyflcsrv2qkrhrs378n3qq3z2c22) gave us a reason to put that thinking into something more structured. This is our attempt at a genuine deep dive: what’s actually gone wrong with treasury governance this cycle, what AtlasHub’s proposal does and doesn’t address, what other DAOs have tried for similar problems, and where we think Cardano could realistically go from here. We’re publishing it as research, not as a vote rationale — our actual vote and its reasoning are recorded separately on our voting page.
1. Executive Summary
Cardano’s treasury governance has worked exactly as designed, and that is precisely the problem. CIP-1694 built a system where DReps vote individually on every withdrawal, gated by an annual Net Change Limit and a Constitutional Committee constitutionality check. In its first eighteen months of full operation, that system has proven it can say no: it killed the Cardano Foundation’s $7.8M Summit 2026 budget by roughly 1.5 percentage points, produced a mixed 6-pass/3-fail split on IOG’s nine-proposal infrastructure push, and forced the abrupt transfer and partial cancellation of Project Catalyst — a program that had distributed over $150M across 2,200+ projects since 2020. Defenders call this fiscal discipline finally functioning. AtlasHub, who submitted “Reforming Treasury Governance,” calls it a “funding impasse” and a “gridlock” that has “invited toxicity” and put rival domains into a “perceived competition for scarce resources” serious enough to endanger Cardano’s stability. Having watched this cycle’s votes unfold from the inside, we think that diagnosis is right.
The proposal’s actual architecture has four moving parts: a reframing of the Net Change Limit as a vague approximation of a budget rather than the budget itself; a mandatory thematic budget with eight named domains (Core Protocol, Developer Tooling, Research, Commercial Growth, Administration, Community/Marketing, Other Strategic/Public-Good, and a Functional Reserve) that DReps vote on as percentage allocations before any individual project is considered; a “strategic entity,” elected for a fixed term, responsible for preparing and proposing that budget; and an “expert commission,” also elected for a fixed term, responsible for evaluating and selecting individual projects within the budget DReps already approved. The voting sequence AtlasHub proposes is NCL → budget (overall amount, structure, percentages) → final treasury withdrawal — and the central claim is that DReps should never again vote a single project’s funding against another project’s funding in a head-to-head, winner-take-the-NCL contest.
We think this is meaningfully better than “create a council and trust it.” Sequencing the vote so DReps approve the shape of spending before anyone evaluates which projects fill those buckets is a real, importable idea, structurally similar to Arbitrum’s category-bounded Foundation budget. But the strategic entity and expert commission are each described in a single sentence, with no eligibility rules, term length, conflict-of-interest disclosure, or sunset clause specified — and AtlasHub says as much directly, noting that “implementation… is beyond scope here.” We read that candor as an invitation to help fill in those gaps, which is what most of this article is for.
Our view, in short: propositions [c] through [g] — the NCL-is-not-a-budget framing and the category-sequenced voting process — are specific enough to act on now, and we think Cardano should adopt them as a standalone reform regardless of what happens to the rest of the proposal. Propositions [h] and [i], the strategic entity and expert commission, are a good idea at the concept stage that needs real design work before either could responsibly be ratified. The bulk of what follows is that design work: what we found comparing Arbitrum, Optimism, MakerDAO, Gitcoin, and Cosmos, and the specific questions we think any follow-up proposal needs to answer.
2. The Problem, as We’ve Watched It Play Out This Cycle
2.1 How the system actually works today
Cardano’s on-chain treasury governance, as constituted under CIP-1694 and the ratified Constitution (85% approval, February 2025), runs through a small number of mechanisms:
- Net Change Limit (NCL): a constitutionally-required Info Action (TREASURY-01a) that DReps must approve, by simple majority of active voting stake, before any Treasury Withdrawal actions for that period can be validly ratified. The 2025 NCL was set at 350 million ADA (epochs 532–604), later extended by 8 epochs to maintain continuity into February 2026. A subsequent Info Action proposed 300M ADA for 2025 and 250M ADA for 2026. This is a ceiling, not a budget — it caps total withdrawals but allocates nothing.
- Treasury Withdrawal actions: individual governance actions, each requiring roughly 67% DRep approval plus Constitutional Committee constitutionality sign-off, subject to a one-epoch enactment delay. These are submitted ad hoc by any ADA holder, though in practice the overwhelming majority come from IOG, the Cardano Foundation, EMURGO, Intersect-administered budget cycles, and a long tail of independent proposers.
- The Constitutional Committee: a seven-member elected body that checks constitutionality, not merit or strategic fit. It does not set priorities or evaluate budget quality.
- Intersect’s Budget Process Framework: a 2026 addition, not part of the original CIP-1694 design — a five-stage, off-chain-first workflow intended to filter and consolidate proposals before they hit the chain.
- The Cardano Foundation’s 2026 review framework: another 2026 add-on — dual independent reviewers scoring proposals against five strategic pillars and against the “Cardano 2030 Vision,” with proposals below 67% off-chain support filtered out before reaching on-chain votes.
What this list tells us: the constitutional core (NCL, per-proposal DRep vote, CC constitutionality check) hasn’t changed since ratification. Everything that looks like strategic triage — Intersect’s process, the Foundation’s scoring rubric, the 2030 Vision itself — has been bolted on informally, off-chain, by individual entities, in direct response to this cycle’s pain. That’s the strongest evidence we have that the system as constitutionally specified is under-equipped for the volume it now has to handle, and it’s exactly the gap “Reforming Treasury Governance” is trying to formalize.
2.2 What this cycle’s votes actually showed
Volume and proposal fatigue. This cycle ran treasury governance continuously rather than episodically — multiple concurrent Treasury Withdrawal actions, NCL extensions, budget framework Info Actions, and constitutional refinements in parallel every epoch. IOG alone submitted nine treasury proposals in a single push spanning consensus scaling, smart contract tooling, developer experience, and formal verification; six passed, three failed (Pogun, Blockfrost’s maintenance/indexing ask, and IO & Midgard Labs’ L2 scalability initiative among those we voted No or Abstain on rather than Yes). That’s a lot of independent technical and financial due diligence to perform per epoch, with no shared scoring infrastructure until the Foundation built one informally in April.
The clearest evidence for AtlasHub’s diagnosis: bundling, then unbundling, then success. IOG’s “Cardano Vision 2026: Human Centred, Scalable, Post Quantum Secure” research initiative — covering quantum-resistant cryptography and Leios scaling, arguably some of the most technically consequential R&D on Cardano’s roadmap — was tracking toward heavy opposition in its initial bundled form. Once split into “IO: Cardano Upgrades,” “IO: Consensus Initiative (Leios),” and the narrower Vision 2026 research ask, we voted Yes on all three and they passed. We think this is the single clearest piece of evidence in this cycle’s record that AtlasHub’s diagnosis — “no isolated treasury withdrawals for individual projects… voted against one another” — is solvable today, without a new entity, simply by splitting bundled mega-proposals into separately-judgeable pieces. Whatever near-rejection happened at the bundled stage was real, but it was a symptom of bundling, and unbundling fixed it without anyone needing new standing authority.
We saw a similar pattern with the Pebble/Gerolamo proposal, where an earlier bundled version (a TypeScript smart-contract language combined with a light-node implementation) struggled to clear threshold; later, separately-submitted versions — “Pebble + Gerolamo - HLabs 2026 Budget” and “Pebble & Ecosystem maintenance: TypeScript core of Cardano” — both passed with our support.
The Summit failure as a case study in threshold brittleness. The Cardano Foundation’s Summit 2026 proposal — even after a 22% budget cut, decoupling from EMURGO’s TOKEN2049 sponsorship, and increased internal cost-absorption — received 64.6–65.2% DRep support (reports vary slightly by snapshot) against a 66.67% supermajority threshold, failing by roughly 1.5 percentage points. We voted No on this one. The episode reveals two separate problems entangled as one: a strategic question — should Cardano fund a flagship marketing event at all in a depressed-ADA-price environment — and a budget-execution question — was this specific $7.8M ask reasonable. A binary vote forces DReps to answer both at once, and a near-miss on a supermajority threshold produces an outcome (zero Summit) that may not reflect what a majority actually wanted (a cheaper Summit), simply because there’s no intermediate mechanism. Under AtlasHub’s eight-domain budget, “Community, Education and Marketing” would receive a percentage allocation DReps vote on once, and the Summit would then compete only against other marketing-category asks for that already-approved pool — not against infrastructure or research proposals in an undifferentiated contest. Whether that would have changed this specific outcome is unknowable, but it’s a real structural difference worth weighing on its own merits.
Catalyst transition as a treasury-continuity failure. Project Catalyst — Cardano’s longest-running treasury-funded program, having distributed over $150M across more than 2,200 projects since inception — was abruptly transitioned from IOG stewardship to Cardano Foundation management this cycle, with Fund15’s already-published 18.5M ADA + 250,000 USDM budget returned to the treasury and Fund15/Fund16 effectively cancelled mid-cycle. Hundreds of applicants who had spent months preparing proposals were left without a voting timeline. We voted Yes on “Approve Cardano Foundation as New Managing Entity of Project Catalyst,” but that vote ratified a fait accompli — we weren’t asked to choose among options for Catalyst’s future before the disruption happened. This is exactly the kind of outcome a strategic entity with a continuity mandate is meant to prevent: the absence of an institutional home with multi-year accountability meant an internal reset among the founding organizations could simply orphan a program serving thousands of community builders.
Centralization risk running in both directions. It would be a mistake to read all of this as “DReps are too powerful, founders too weak.” The Foundation’s decision to delegate an additional 220M ADA to eleven hand-picked DReps this cycle (bringing its total delegation to 360M ADA) is itself a centralization vector — a single founding entity can materially move outcomes by choosing which DReps to fund, with no transparency requirement forcing other large ADA holders to disclose similar arrangements. Meanwhile, the handful of founding-era organizations that increasingly coordinate jointly on proposals like the 70M ADA Critical Integrations Budget create the opposite risk: consolidated, take-it-or-leave-it asks that are harder to amend than they would be if submitted independently. Any reform that creates a new strategic entity or expert commission has to reckon with the fact that Cardano already has a centralization problem on both the proposer side and the voter side before adding a third locus of concentrated influence.
2.3 Summary table — symptoms and root causes
| Symptom observed this cycle | Concrete example | Root cause in current design |
|---|---|---|
| Strategic R&D budget initially bundled at heavy opposition, later passed once split | IOG Vision 2026 / Leios / Cardano Upgrades, split into 3 separate Yes votes | No mechanism to separate “endorse the direction” from “approve this exact number” until the proposer voluntarily split the ask |
| Flagship event cancelled by a 1.5-point miss | Cardano Summit 2026, 64.6–65.2% vs 66.67% | Single binary supermajority threshold; no graduated or conditional approval path |
| Bundled, hard-to-evaluate proposals | Pebble + Gerolamo combined ask | No pre-vote portfolio construction or proposal-splitting requirement |
| Flagship program orphaned mid-cycle | Project Catalyst transition, Fund15/16 cancelled | No standing institutional home with a multi-year continuity mandate |
| DRep proposal-evaluation overload | 9 simultaneous IOG proposals; continuous NCL/CC/budget actions | No shared, pre-vote technical/financial triage layer until ad hoc 2026 fixes |
| Concentrated influence on both sides | CF’s 360M ADA delegated to 11 chosen DReps; coordinated joint proposals | No disclosure requirement for large delegation arrangements; no anti-bundling rule for multi-entity proposals |
3. Reading the Proposal on Its Own Terms
We want to be direct about what AtlasHub actually wrote, because the abstract alone undersells how concrete this is. AtlasHub describes themselves as “a small DRep, committed to Cardano since 2019. No drama, no FUD, no ‘social’ media” — this isn’t a founding-entity proposal of the kind we flag as a centralization risk above. It’s an individual DRep’s diagnosis, submitted as an Info Action that explicitly disclaims binding force: “an implementation will require further refinements and amendments to the current process as well as the constitution,” and “these basic ideas may freely be adopted, extended or modified for concrete implementation which is beyond scope here.” We’re reading this in good faith, as a discussion-opening paper rather than a finished design, and our analysis below treats it that way.
3.1 What the proposal actually says
The abstract is candid about the stakes: treasury governance is “in a poor state,” there is “a funding impasse,” and the existing governance system only “indirectly addresses” treasury governance, leaving it “barely supported.” The motivation goes further — “significant dysfunctionalities,” a “perceived competition for scarce resources” between domains, “hostility and detrimental conflict,” “ill will and strife that harm the Cardano ecosystem, endangering its existence,” and “gridlock over treasury spending between different positions and coalitions.” That’s strong language for an Info Action, and it tracks closely with what we’ve just walked through in Section 2.
The nine “Basic Propositions” [a]–[i] build a specific architecture, not just a sentiment:
- [a]–[b] assert treasury governance needs “a clear direction, a coherent strategy and a specific roadmap,” explicitly addressed and supported by “the governance system and the constitution” — framed from the outset as requiring constitutional change, not a process tweak.
- [c] makes the proposal’s most defensible point: the NCL is “at best a vague initial approximation for the concept of a budget,” not a budget itself, and “a collection of incoherent treasury withdrawals” within that ceiling is “not enough for effective treasury governance.”
- [d]–[e] call for “a dedicated budget for investing” that includes “the strategic direction and the roadmap,” structured thematically so “various important domains exist side by side” and “none of these domains can be deferred in favor of another.”
- [f]–[g] are the structural core: “no isolated treasury withdrawals for individual projects must be put on a vote against one another,” and DReps should “vote on dedicated and balanced budgets, not on the funding of individual projects” — justified on cognitive-load grounds, since “few DReps are experts in even a single domain, hardly any are competent in multiple domains.”
- [h] introduces the strategic entity: “responsible for preparing, proposing and implementing a budget,” “appointed by a vote for a fixed term.”
- [i] introduces the expert commission: “responsible for the evaluation and selection of projects that best meet the budgetary requirements,” also “appointed by a vote for a fixed term.”
The proposed process is explicit and sequential: NCL vote → budget vote (overall amount, thematic structure, percentage allocations, with no individual projects considered yet) → project application window → final treasury withdrawal vote (the entity/commission’s selected project list under the already-approved budget). The budget structure is a concrete eight-category taxonomy: Core Protocol and Infrastructure, Developer Tooling and Technical Resources, Research and Innovation, Commercial Ecosystem Growth, Administration and Operational Support, Community/Education/Marketing, Other Strategic or Public-Good Initiatives, and a Functional Reserve “directly accessible under predefined conditions” for emergencies.
3.2 What we think is genuinely strong here
The diagnosis matches what we’ve just lived through. Proposition [g]’s claim — that DReps are forced into head-to-head comparisons across domains they aren’t equally equipped to judge — maps precisely onto Pebble/Gerolamo’s bundling, the Summit competing implicitly against infrastructure and research for the same undifferentiated pool, and IOG’s nine simultaneous proposals landing on every DRep’s plate in the same window. We are not equally qualified to assess a Plutus-performance upgrade and a conference-marketing budget, and this system currently asks us to do exactly that, repeatedly, with no division of labor.
The sequencing fix is real and importable, not just rhetoric. Voting on the shape of spending before anyone evaluates which projects fill it has precedent: Arbitrum’s Foundation operates within DAO-approved spending categories rather than a category-blind aggregate, and Cosmos chains debate community-pool parameters before specific spend proposals are submitted against the pool. AtlasHub’s version — percentage allocations across eight named domains, voted on before any project is named — is arguably cleaner than either comparator, because it makes the category-level trade-offs explicit and votable rather than implicit in whoever wins an aggregate negotiation.
The Functional Reserve answers a gap we and others in the community have raised independently — a standing emergency or bug-fix reserve, separate from the main NCL-gated pool — which is convergent evidence this is a real, recognized need rather than a speculative one.
And the proposal is honest about its own incompleteness. It explicitly defers implementation detail and invites the community to “collaborate.” That’s the right posture for an Info Action introducing a structural idea, and it’s a meaningfully better starting point than a proposal that asks for blank-check authority up front.
3.3 Where we think the design work still needs to happen
Propositions [h] and [i] are each one sentence, and that sentence doesn’t answer the questions that actually determine whether these bodies are safe to create. “Appointed by a vote for a fixed term” doesn’t tell us who is eligible to run, how long a term actually is, whether re-appointment is unlimited, what disclosure applies if a candidate is affiliated with an organization that already proposes treasury withdrawals, or whether “implementing a budget” means execution authority or only proposal authority. We don’t read this as a flaw in AtlasHub’s thinking — the text says outright that this is “beyond scope here” — but it is the part of the proposal that needs the most work before we’d be comfortable with a binding ratification, and it’s also the part where we think our research can be most useful. Sections 4 and 6 below work through specific, evidence-based recommendations for closing each of these gaps rather than just naming them.
4. What Other DAOs Have Tried, and What Actually Happened
Cardano isn’t the first treasury to wrestle with the tension between strategic coherence and decentralized control, so before forming a view on AtlasHub’s proposal we spent time looking at how four other ecosystems have approached versions of the same problem, plus a fifth model that takes a different approach entirely. None of them has solved this cleanly, and we think that’s worth saying plainly rather than presenting any one of them as a template. The honest picture is a menu of trade-offs, each with real costs that showed up after the fact, not before.
| DAO / System | Treasury model | What worked | What failed or remains contested |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arbitrum DAO | Foundation manages a multi-year operating budget under board discretion within DAO-approved categories; a separately-elected Security Council handles emergencies only, not strategy | Clean separation of security emergency power from spending discretion; the DAO evaluates strategy and execution as one package per cycle rather than relitigating it proposal by proposal | DAO oversight is effectively a single aggregate vote per cycle, not line-item; Foundation spend (~$27.6M projected 2027 opex) runs well ahead of the DAO’s own protocol revenue (~$23.5M gross profit 2025), drawing recurring “are we funding a deficit” criticism from the DAO’s own delegates |
| Optimism Collective | Bicameral: a Token House (day-to-day protocol governance) and a Citizens’ House (reputation-based badgeholders) that controls public-goods funding and holds veto power over the Token House, but no unilateral spending power | A genuine separation of “who decides the money supply question” from “who decides allocation” — the veto-not-control design lets a reputation-weighted layer check a token-weighted layer without simply replacing it | RetroPGF, the Citizens’ House’s signature mechanism, is paused through the end of 2026 after persistent difficulty measuring “impact” consistently enough for allocations to feel fair — even some of its largest, longest-standing recipients have said publicly that funding doesn’t track impact proportionally |
| MakerDAO → Sky (Endgame) | Restructured a single DAO into modular “SubDAOs” (“Stars,” Spark first) under a new constitutional document, explicitly to escape governance that had become too slow for a multi-billion-dollar protocol | A genuine reduction in decision latency for specialized domains — Spark’s lending-market parameters move faster under its own SubDAO than they could have under unified Maker governance; an honest acknowledgment that voter apathy needed a structural fix, not just a cultural one | Three-plus years of disruption to execute, with two governance tokens running in parallel for an extended period; a persistent, unresolved community concern about quiet recentralization around the chief architect’s own design choices; a 2024 vote to simply rebrand back to the old name was itself rejected, suggesting the community’s discomfort never fully settled |
| Gitcoin Grants (Quadratic Funding) | Donor-driven funding rounds with sybil- and collusion-resistant matching; wound down its no-code product in 2025 to refocus on a “toolbox” of allocation mechanisms (quadratic, retroactive, streaming, conviction voting, prediction-market-based evaluation) | Genuinely opens funding competition to broad community preference rather than concentrated capital or insider committees; years of continuous, public iteration on attack-resistance is itself a meaningful governance asset other ecosystems can learn from directly | Even the most mature implementations concede their defenses “mitigate but do not eliminate” sybil and collusion attacks; popularity bias toward well-known teams persists; and the mechanism only decides how money already sitting in a pool gets split — it says nothing about where that pool’s money comes from or how large it should be |
| Cosmos Hub / Cosmos ecosystem | A Community Pool funded by a small, automatic tax on staking rewards, spent through on-chain governance proposals; each Cosmos chain sets its own tax rate and process independently | Continuous, automatic, modest replenishment decouples treasury growth from large, one-off allocation fights — there’s no annual “set the ceiling” negotiation of the kind Cardano’s NCL process goes through every cycle | Community-pool spend proposals have repeatedly struggled with low voter turnout and the same “one large validator effectively decides” dynamic that any liquid-democracy system, Cardano’s included, is exposed to; no Cosmos chain has actually solved strategic coherence across years any better than Cardano has — most spend decisions remain one-off, exactly the problem AtlasHub is trying to fix |
A few things stand out across all five. Every system that has tried to add strategic coherence on top of token-holder governance has traded away some granularity of oversight to get it — Arbitrum traded line-item visibility for planning coherence, Optimism traded allocation simplicity for an expertise layer that is itself still struggling with measurement, MakerDAO traded years of disruption for decision speed. None of them found a way around that trade; they just chose different points on it. Cosmos is the interesting outlier, because its automatic-replenishment model sidesteps the NCL-style annual negotiation entirely — worth a look for Cardano’s smaller, community-grant-sized funding needs even if it doesn’t solve the larger strategic-coherence question AtlasHub is focused on. And Gitcoin’s experience is a useful reminder that even mechanisms purpose-built to resist capture took years of iterative, public defense-building to get where they are — nothing here was solved on the first attempt, anywhere.
5. What We Think Cardano Should Take From This
Putting the proposal text and the comparative research together, here’s where we land.
Propositions [c] through [g] — the NCL-is-not-a-budget framing and the category-sequenced voting process — are specific enough to act on now. We’ve watched this cycle prove the underlying diagnosis correct in real time: a research push that nearly failed bundled and then passed once split, a Summit forced into an all-or-nothing vote against an undifferentiated pool, a flagship community program orphaned with no continuity mechanism. The category-sequenced budget AtlasHub proposes is a genuine structural fix for at least the first two of those, and we think it’s strong enough to move forward as its own reform, regardless of what happens with the rest of the proposal.
Propositions [h] and [i] are where the real work still needs to happen. A single sentence each — “appointed by a vote for a fixed term” — doesn’t yet say enough to know what’s actually being created, and rather than just naming that gap, we’d rather use what we found above to suggest what we think the answer should look like.
On the strategic entity: the clearest failure mode we found elsewhere is conflating “prepares and proposes a budget” with “executes it.” Arbitrum’s Foundation does both, and the result is a DAO that votes once on an aggregate number it didn’t shape and then has limited ongoing visibility into how it’s spent. We think this entity’s mandate should stop at preparing and proposing a multi-year category framework — DReps keep the binding vote on the framework itself, and keep the binding vote on every Treasury Withdrawal that disburses against it. That’s a narrower and safer reading of “implementing” than the current text allows for, and we think it’s worth spelling out explicitly rather than leaving to interpretation.
On the expert commission: Optimism’s Citizens’ House is the closest working model — it scores and can veto, but a separate body still casts the binding vote. We think the commission’s output should be a published, reasoned recommendation per project, with DReps retaining final approval. Optimism’s experience also shows the harder problem isn’t whether the body exists, it’s whether “impact” or “merit” can be measured consistently enough that scores don’t become arbitrary — RetroPGF’s own pause is partly a function of that difficulty. Whatever rubric the commission uses should be published and held stable across cycles, not reinvented each round.
On eligibility for both bodies: this is, in our view, the single highest-leverage design choice available here. A meaningful share of this ecosystem’s treasury proposals already come from a small set of coordinating organizations. We’re not assuming bad intent, but an unrestricted appointment process would let those same organizations staff the bodies that prepare and evaluate everyone else’s proposals. We think there should be mandatory, public disclosure of any affiliation with an organization that has submitted a treasury proposal in the prior two cycles — not necessarily exclusion, but disclosure, so whoever is appointing or re-electing these seats can weigh it.
On term length and review: short enough that a single appointment can’t quietly become a multi-year fixture, with affirmative re-ratification required at the end of each term rather than passive continuation. MakerDAO’s SubDAO restructuring is the cautionary example here — a strong technical case, three-plus years of disruption to implement, and a persistent community question about whether it quietly recentralized around its own architects. A built-in, low-friction review point at each term’s end is the cheapest insurance against that outcome.
We think this proposal is close to something genuinely useful, and we’d like to see the open discussion AtlasHub invited actually happen on these specific questions, rather than the idea either stalling for lack of detail or getting ratified before the detail exists.
6. A Possible Path Forward, Ranked
To make the above concrete, here’s how we’d sequence reform if it were entirely up to us — from what’s specific enough to act on immediately to what we think needs to wait.
Now — ratify the sequencing reform (propositions [c]–[g]): formally adopt the NCL-is-not-a-budget distinction and the category-percentage voting sequence, using AtlasHub’s eight-domain taxonomy as the starting structure. This requires no new standing body, builds on the existing TREASURY-01a mechanism, and directly fixes the bundling and head-to-head-competition problems documented in Section 2. We’d pair it with a constitutionality rule, enforced by the existing CC check, that bundled unrelated initiatives must be submitted as separate asks within their categories.
Next — pilot a recommendation-only expert commission: stand up the commission described in proposition [i], but resolve the open questions in the conservative direction from day one — elected seats, mandatory conflict-of-interest disclosure, a published and stable scoring rubric, and explicitly recommendation-only authority, with DReps retaining the binding vote. Run it as a pilot for one full budget cycle before any further constitutional embedding.
In parallel — a small, capped pilot for Catalyst continuity: a fixed, modest percentage of the NCL ring-fenced for community/public-goods funding, allocated through adapted quadratic-funding mechanics, specifically to give displaced Catalyst applicants a path forward while the broader reform is still being designed. This is worth doing regardless of how the entity/commission question resolves.
Deferred — the strategic entity as written: we’d hold off on ratifying proposition [h] until it comes back with eligibility rules, a bounded term, an explicit “preparing and proposing, not implementing” mandate, and a sunset clause requiring affirmative re-ratification. If the lighter reforms above turn out to solve most of the fatigue and bundling problems on their own, the case for this body weakens; if they don’t, we’ll have real data to design it properly rather than guessing.
Not now — full SubDAO-style decomposition: the more ambitious MakerDAO-style restructuring into specialized sub-treasuries is a reasonable long-term idea, but Cardano doesn’t yet have the tooling, the precedent, or the evidence that lighter reforms have been tried and found wanting — all of which we think should come first.
This article was written by RCADA DRep as independent research into Cardano’s treasury governance and the “Reforming Treasury Governance” Info Action. Our on-chain voting record and governance methodology are published separately at our voting record and governance policy.