Project Catalyst

We would like to share an update regarding Project Catalyst. Following our joint review, @IOGroup, which operates Catalyst today, and the @Cardano_CF have agreed to work expediently towards the Cardano Foundation assuming stewardship of Project Catalyst. This transition is now underway and members of our Catalyst team will join the Cardano Foundation to ensure funding continuity for all existing grantees. The programme continues to administer funding to more than 500 active projects, with over 2200 projects funded to date. As part of this process, in consultation with the Cardano Foundation we have also agreed that running Fund15 and Fund16 in their proposed form is not feasible at this time of transition. The near-term focus will be on maintaining continuity for all grantees through Fund14, ensuring that funds continue to be administered in line with agreed milestones. Meanwhile, the Catalyst team, the Cardano Foundation and @IntersectMBO will continue to work together to develop a clear path forward for the future of community funding. At the heart of these plans is our community whose input will be invaluable to this process. Work also continues steadily towards other funding opportunities and maximising synergies for the @Cardano ecosystem. We would like to thank all those projects that submitted their applications for funding to Fund15 and deeply regret that we cannot see these projects through at this time. While we recalibrate, we believe it is appropriate that all ada previously earmarked for grant funding in Fund15 and Fund16 be returned to the treasury in alignment with Intersect. We’d like to thank the community for their patience while we finalize the process. Further updates on the status of this and future rounds will be shared once the transition is complete.

🚨BREAKING🚨 Our solution, “Fornesic Management Systems” has processed 70,000+ transactions on Cardano Mainnet. We shall continue to deliver Real World Impact with the support of the entire Cardano Ecosystem. 🙏

Shaping the Future of Catalyst Milestones: Your Feedback Needed 😎 Hello beautiful soul! It’s been a bit of a roller coaster start to 2026, but our mission remains unchanged. Throughout the second half of 2025, I wrote extensively about the need to refresh the Catalyst Milestone Program to keep pace with our rapidly evolving ecosystem. We’ve already begun this journey with targeted tooling improvements in Q4, but now it’s time to go deeper. As I shared in December, H1-2026 is dedicated to refining the Milestone Program - the true cornerstone of how @Catalyst_onX operates today. You can catch up on some of that convo here: x.com/dannyribar/sta… So what's next? Aligning for Success 🚀 Our first major step is harmonizing requirements between Funded Proposers and Milestone Reviewers. By narrowing the gap in understanding and aligning our expectations, we can: 👉 Set every participant up for success from day one. 👉 Ensure accountability that is both repeatable and auditable. 👉 Standardize the "Proof of Achievement" (PoA) process to remove guesswork across both functional roles - proposers and reviewers alike. Because this program is deeply embedded into the @Cardano ecosystem, I want to ensure these changes reflect (y)our collective reality. Please review the document below and leave your comments or observations directly on the text: docs.google.com/document/d/1I4… ⏲️ Timeline: I’m looking to lock these updates down and roll them out before the end of this month, so your early input is greatly appreciated. As always - we aim to iterate in a continuous feedback loop. What can you expect next? Comprehensive skills audit across our entire pool of reviewers to identify gaps and opportunities for up-skilling or re-orientaion. Thank you for staying the course with us. Catalyst thrives because we listen, learn, and level up together. D.

Last week, the Project Catalyst team shared an update on project developments and the recent announcement of a pause for Fund 15. Our teams, together with @Catalyst_onX, @IOGroup, and @IntersectMBO are continuing their collaborative efforts on a joint strategic and operational review of the Project Catalyst. Teams are discussing and building a plan for the future direction of Catalyst, looking specifically at ecosystem growth, engagement and funding synergies. The Catalyst team continues to process all Fund applications up to and including Fund 14, subject to agreed milestones. Updates will follow shortly, reflecting the progress of the joint teams, thank you for your patience.

ℹ️ Please read this update from the Catalyst Team. Blog: projectcatalyst.io/blog/update-fr…

Cooking 🧑‍🍳

2025 was the first time in @Catalyst_onX history that every scheduled target distribution window took place as planned. No downtime. Meaning - program facilitated reliable bi-weekly disbursements via 126 transactions. Long term goal is - to turn it into self-service. You claim and draw down on your own time once all relevant approvals/sign offs are in place.

Catalyst Fund15 just leveled up. From 1,643 (F14) → 761 submissions → just 509 high-quality proposals on the ballot. Less noise, stronger moderation and more visibility for serious builders. This is the quality shift the ecosystem has been asking for:

ℹ️ Please read the update about today's scheduled start of Fund15 Voting: projectcatalyst.io/blog/update-on…

This is fire. The @Catalyst_onX team focusing on quality over quantity is a huge step in the right direction. Hope to see even further refinement focused around immediate "Needs" and less of the "Wants". Well done.

This fund, we’re not submitting any proposals to @Catalyst_onX. Still, I’d love to support projects building truly interesting things on Cardano. It feels like we’re reaching a level of maturity where the tech is ready to make real-world impact. Please let me know which proposals I should be taking a look at!

@dannyribar From my perspective, Project Catalyst has reached a new level of maturity, currently driven by its innovations. I’m proud to have contributed to the moderation process and to see 509 strong projects now heading to vote in Fund 15. Kudos Danny and the Catalyst ecosystem.

@dannyribar A great addition to the review stage, in my view this model brought significantly more advantages than disadvantages. It's an update that truly brings more quality, accountability and an incentive to builders to professionalize.

I know where I was on January 6, 2021. I was in a #Cardano Catalyst book club, discussing The Sovereign Individual, when @QuasarSure showed up waving his hands on the video call. "Something is happening" he said, "turn on the news!" We watched together as the events of that day unfolded in Washington, DC. Project Catalyst (@Catalyst_onX) had launched Fund 1 in the summer of 2020, and I had been working in the Cardano ecosystem for about six months. In those days, book clubs were one of my favorite ways to get to know people. We read about governance, economics, technology, and history. Suddenly, there we were, discussing a book that predicted the collapse of the nation-state, while watching something that looked a bit like that. The interpretations of January 6 diverge as sharply as the two books I want to talk about today. Some see vindication for those seeking exit from a collapsing state. Others see a warning about what happens when political imagination is captured by myths of grievance. The Sovereign Individual, published in 1997, told a story about how the information age would erode nation-state power. Cryptography and global networks would make exit viable for those with resources. The elite individual, freed from the demands of redistribution, would flourish across competing jurisdictions. Not everyone would become sovereign, but the talented few would escape the "tyranny of place." Initially dismissed as fringe libertarianism, the book had by the 2020's become foundational in Silicon Valley and the cryptocurrency movement. Later in 2021, The Dawn of Everything was published. In it, David Graeber and David Wengrow try to dismantle the stories we tell about prehistory and the assumption that humans inevitably progressed from egalitarian bands to hierarchical states. Drawing on archaeological evidence, they show how our ancestors experimented constantly with social arrangements: seasonally shifting between hierarchical and egalitarian modes, building large cities while consciously rejecting centralized power. Their argument is that we have always had political imagination, but that by the 21st century, we had too often forgotten that we possess it. Both books reject the inevitability of state domination. But where one imagines freedom in escape, the other imagines it in collective creativity. One assumes hierarchy is natural and seeks personal liberation (or at least a safe route to the top); the other argues that we have more options than we think. In my 5+ years of working in the blockchain industry, I have found so much more motivation in The Dawn of Everything. Some of its archaeological claims have been disputed. Critics argue that the authors cherry-picked evidence and extrapolated too freely from recent ethnography to prehistory. That's fair. But the core insight sustains my ability to keep working in an industry that makes grand claims but hasn't yet delivered on pushing power to the edges. Human history is longer, more varied, and more creative than we currently acknowledge. It's a theme I return to again and again with friends and collaborators in the Cardano ecosystem. Decentralized systems, I have learned, are less about revolutions than about reclaiming ancient wisdom. The Sovereign Individual tells one story, a fear-based tale I have always fundamentally disagreed with: that freedom means needing no one. I believe individual sovereignty is a myth, and a dangerous one. It's another way to position us against each other. I know that nation states do not always act in the best interests of their subjects. I know that my federal government does not always work in my best interests. But neither does my local government, or Cardano governance, for that matter. That's a feature of governance. I'm not always right. I don't always know what's best. I get closer to the truth by figuring it out with other people. That's why I'll always choose education, creativity, and collaboration over violence as my preferred tools for change. Why does this matter today? We're entering a new year where the basic definition of what a computer is, where the basic definition of what "information technology" is, are changing dramatically. "Technology" has never been a monolithic thing, and that is more true than ever. It's been true for a long time that we can use technology to create or to consume, and I've come to see the distinction between blockchain and AI through this lens. AI allows any of us to quickly consume distilled human knowledge. Blockchain allows us, one transaction at a time, to weave a story of individuals working together. AI amazes us with averages that erase the specific. But it cannot tell you *who* contributed *what*. The individual, who probably worked really hard to make an impact on the world, dissolves into the aggregate. AI is the culmination of Shoshana Zuboff's surveillance capitalism (2019): extraction, prediction, and behavioral modification at scale. Blockchains preserves particularity. They force us to decide if a transaction is worth signing. Collaboration becomes legible not as aggregate behavior but as specific acts of coordination. Slow consensus, waiting for nodes - and people! - to agree, is not friction to be eliminated but the root of trust itself. To me, the tragedy is that much of blockchain development has been captured by Sovereign Individual ideology: wealth accumulation, exit, escape. In the last five years, we have struggled to find use cases for blockchain and we've watched AI capture the public imagination. Blockchain has been reduced to "crypto" and "decentralized finance." That's going to change this year. Those of us who see blockchain differently are not just building ways for more people to trade tokens. We are building systems where working together is tangible. This is why I build in the Cardano ecosystem, and it's why I am building Andamio. Not because I believe in exit, but because I believe blockchain can be infrastructure for the kind of collective experimentation that The Dawn of Everything suggests. Cardano has always been a social technology. I have watched it change the lives of people who barely use it, people for whom the blockchain itself is secondary to the relationships, the governance experiments, the communities of practice that have grown up around it. The technology matters, but what matters more is what it makes possible between people. With @andamio_teams, we are building tools that make it more likely that collaboration will take root and thrive. These are not tools for escaping society. They are tools for improving society, together. Can AI and blockchain work together for broad human flourishing? I fully expect that they will. AI will extend our collective capabilities, and blockchain will be the foundation of collective accountability. We'll have speed where it serves our goals and slowness where the distribution of trust and power matter. This year, let's keep building infrastructure that treats political imagination as a collective resource to be cultivated, not a constraint to be escaped. The arrangements of power have always been choices. The question I'm asking on this 5th anniversary of whatever happened in D.C. on January 6, 2021, is whether we make them alone or together.

GM Cardano TGIFriday... @Catalyst_onX Fund15 ballot is public

Catalyst 2026: Hardening our Foundation for the Road Ahead 🏗️ Some personal musings as I look toward @Catalyst_onX in 2026 and what I'd like to see transpire from the operational perspective. As there are many facets to this program. We are about to push the envelope even further, focusing on three things: hardening institutional integrity, maintaining zero tolerance for fraud, and protecting the space for honest innovation to breathe. Following the upgrades rolled out in late 2025, Catalyst has moved past the "experiment" phase. It is now a mature, professional funding institution. With these frameworks finally in place, the mission is clear: Protect the community treasury while ensuring the safest possible environment for genuine builders. 🛡️ 1⃣ A New global benchmark: "Risk Intolerant Sentinel" status 🎖️ Trust isn’t a vague value - it’s a practice. Catalyst recently achieved “Risk Intolerant Sentinel” status, the highest global tier for compliance and integrity. Important to realise - that compliance is always a moving target as actors get more sophisticated in their ways - and thus one must constantly be on the look out for new potential exploits. It's never static effort, or one and done. This isn't just about badges; it represents a fundamental shift in how the program defends itself. By integrating industry-leading tools to combat identity theft, deepfakes, and systematic fraud, the infrastructure is finally catching up to the mission. While privacy is a core pillar of blockchain, public spending requires absolute accountability. The goal is to ensure community funds reach the right hands and stay there. 💰 2⃣ Drawing the line: Fraud vs. Innovation ⚖️ In our ecosystem, people use the word "scam" pretty liberally. But we need to be precise. There is a massive difference between a bad actor and an honest failure. Zero Tolerance for Fraud: There is no room here for front entities or identity spoofing. Strict KYC/KYB/AML protocols have closed the gaps considerably that absence of such - may have allowed for anonymity-shielded misconduct. 🚫 Space for Innovation: Catalyst is an innovation fund, which means failure is expected. It’s part of the process of finding what actually works. No team will ever be penalized for an idea that simply didn't pan out. Honest failure is part of the journey - however - deception is not. 🌱 The aim is a balanced "Risk Intolerant" posture toward fraud, while remaining "Risk Patient" toward the experimental nature of building on Cardano. 3⃣ The operational reality: Clearing the path 🚜 Let’s be real - this transition to higher standards creates friction. It’s "work in the trenches," and it might hurt for a moment as all projects are squared away, but the progress is undeniable: The Clean Slate: As of December 2025, every project from Funds 2 through 9 has been formally closed or cancelled. ✅ The Horizon: In Q1 and Q2 2026, the focus shifts to Fund10 and later cohorts. We are clearing the backlog and ensuring every active project meets these professional standards. We've began piloting formal notifications via "Grantee Statement of Concerns" that help proposers navigate their steps ahead with clarity. 🔍 4⃣ Co-designing "guardrails" for 2026 🤝 A mature system has to be ready for the exceptions. In H1-2026, an initiative will launch to co-design a formal pilot Whistleblower Program alongside the community building upon already in place as of Q4/2025 - a small but powerful helpdesk feature - that helps with flagging misconduct. But process needs to mature. This isn't a top-down mandate. It’s a collaborative effort to build the rails that allow for the safe recognition and resolution of misconduct. It’s about protecting the community without scaring off the genuine builders we want to support. 📢 5⃣ Professionalizing the front lines (Milestone Reviews) Our 100+ Milestone Reviewers are the stewards of this ecosystem. To match our "Sentinel" status, we are raising the bar for how program interacts with funded projects. Together with the cohorts - we will be running series of scheduled retrospectives and surveys across participants to further identify opportunities for iteration, improvements and build upon recently deployed solutions. I've shared this memo with the cohort in December: x.com/dannyribar/sta… The Bottom Line 🏁 For far too long, "speeding on the highway" was tolerated as Catalyst tried to be everything to everyone. This wasn't by choice but by necessity of the state of the space program has operated within over the years. Now, with Cardano's on chain governance fully deployed - those days are over. Catalyst is now a professional organization that demands rigor because that’s what the @Cardano community deserves. Every lever at our disposal is being used to clean up the ecosystem, protect the treasury, and empower the next generation of pioneers. To all the beautiful souls in this community: thank you for the patience, the sharp feedback, and the dedication. Let’s keep our heads grounded and keep leading from the front. 🫡 Throughout 2025, I commit to writing in public long form more often to help share and distribute these accumulated lessons and challenges so we all can compare our perspectives and build from there. Happy New Year to all of you. Danny 🍀

Big moves are coming to @Catalyst_onX in 2026. 🚀 Following our long awaited upgrades to Catalyst program that you've witnessed rolled out in the second half of 2025, in mid-December, I sent a community-led roadmap update to our cohort of 107 Milestone Reviewers outlining how we’re levelling up the Cardano landscape. The focus? 👁‍🗨 1⃣ Standardizing processes and policies to level set expectations 2⃣ Upgrading our tools for efficiency 1⃣ + 2⃣ = 3⃣ And as a result of the two above - elevating transparency across the board through information accessibility/availability. Q1/Q2-2026 are going to be another round of work in the trenches shoulder to shoulder with the community leaders and advocates to continue fine-tuning and elevating the program. Read the full email here: ---- Hi Team 👋, Hope this message finds you well, beautiful souls. As we continue our work in the milestone program, I want to share some reflections based on recent conversations and observations regarding our review standards. We operate almost exclusively in a written medium 📝. This form has inherent limitations - tone is easily lost, and nuance is often misinterpreted. Because of this, the clarity and quality of our communication matter just as much as the technical details. I want to address a tension that often comes up: The balance between being supportive and being strict. Some of you have rightly pointed out that we cannot simply "rubber stamp" everything. You are correct. We are the stewards of this ecosystem, and identifying projects that are under-delivering (or acting in bad faith) is a requirement of the job. However, the way we deliver that news determines if we succeed or fail. 🛡️ Decorum is Strategic, Not Just "Nice" To the outside world, your reviews are the program. The quality of your engagement directly influences how our entire ecosystem is evaluated. When we face a challenging proposer, losing our cool or getting personal causes reputational damage that affects us all. It turns a valid rejection into a "tomato fight" 🍅 where the logic gets lost in the noise. The Standard: We must resist the temptation to descend into emotional back-and-forths. The Goal: Stick strictly to the facts. When you maintain professional decorum, you remove the proposer’s ability to deflect the conversation onto "how" they were treated, forcing them to focus on "what" they delivered. 📝 The Core Issues: Ambiguity & Latency While decorum is the baseline, my concern regarding our collective current performance isn't just tone - it is also centerred around substance and speed. We are seeing a consistent gap in how feedback is structured, which creates ripple effects for the support desk and delays for everyone. To fix this, we need to tighten up two areas: 1. Radical Clarity (No Guesswork) We do not have the luxury of reading each other's minds. Far too often, reviews leave the proposer (and me) guessing what is actually wrong. Avoid: "This isn't good enough." Adopt: "This evidence is insufficient because [Specific Gap]. To approve this milestone, we require [Specific Artifact/Data]." If the feedback isn't actionable, the review isn't finished. This is critical. Similarly - this logic is critical for your approvals as well. Your reviews must demonstrate that you've reviewed all evidence and how you arrived to the conclusion that it is approved. No vague statements, actual quantifying notes why you believe PoA is approved and has met relevant criteria. One line approvals are not sufficient and you must demonstrate your line of thought with clarity. 2. Timeliness & Protocols Slow feedback loops drain momentum. We know that schedules shift and life gets in the way, but without proactive updates, delays create real friction for the funded teams waiting on our feedback. If you go on holiday, get sick, or life just gets too much - that is okay. Just let us know via helpdesk so we can temporarily assign your project load to someone else. We also recognize that the friction isn't always on your side. We see that delays often originate from proposers submitting weeks late or providing incomplete resubmissions - yet they still expect a fast turnaround from you. We are aware of this dynamic. It is a key part of the picture that our constant iteration and protocol updates attempt to address. Our goal is to minimize friction wherever possible to provide you with the best environment to do your best work. To ensure we support the proposers effectively, good to reminder ourselves about the following protocols that are currently in play regarding our standard turnaround times (±48h for SoMs / ±72h for PoAs): The 10-Day Backstop: If any review is not completed within 10 calendar days of the submission date, the task will be automatically and permanently reallocated to ensure the project timeline is respected. Project Assignment: Consistency is key for these long-term engagements. Please be aware that if meeting the ±48/72-hour turnaround becomes a consistent challenge, we will need to reassign the project to a reviewer with greater availability. 🔜 The Path Forward We are not asking you to lower your standards. In fact, I am asking you to raise them. 1⃣ Be strict on requirements. 2⃣ Be precise in your writing. 3⃣ Be professional in your tone. In Q1, we will be inviting you to reflect together in a series of retrospectives and surveys. We want to collect your best insights to help further shape the roadmap for this program - both on policy and equally on the tooling level. Meanwhile, don't be shy to engage in our private Milestone Program telegram chat. 🌟 A Note of Appreciation While we focus today on closing gaps, I want to ensure we don't lose sight of the bigger picture: The work you are doing is overwhelmingly positive. In fact, this program represents the most successful and consistent example of community collaboration we have seen to date. You are the pioneers proving that this system works. The adjustments above are simply to ensure that your hard work isn't overshadowed by the few instances where friction occurs. Thank you for showing up, for your patience, and for your dedication to getting this right. Let’s keep our heads grounded, keep our feedback sharp, and guide the community with clarity. I wish you all good holiday season ahead and looking forward to what we'll be able to do together in 2026. I appreciate each and every one of you. Danny ---

Cardano Forum Year in Review. Did you know the @Catalyst_onX Fund15 eligibility and accountability updates were the most read and liked announcements on the Cardano Forum in 2025? This level of engagement highlights that the community is deeply invested in elevating Catalyst. It also reinforces a vital insight: providing ecosystem-wide advance notice is essential for alignment when rolling out major changes. Note for 2026 - communicate well, best if done in appropriate advance time frame, and with reliable clarity. Work to do get even better, room to grow. 💪 Original post: forum.cardano.org/t/submitting-a…