Rodrigo P₳cini | Agora Research | dRep

This morning I've created a new dashboard on DaveGov, the goal is to showcase Cardanos largest DRep spenders, the DReps that have voted Yes on the most ADA withdrawals so far each year, this is configurable by year, so you can see this data also historically. You can see the leaderboard total YES votes in ADA, and the amount withdrawn from the treasury so far. I won't post the top spenders in the screenshot below, but feel free to have a browse, this is purely for awareness. Voting Yes for most proposals keeps you popular, but doesn't enforce fiscal responsibility or prove that you understand what you are voting for. This page auto-updates. Hope you like it, feedback completely welcome! governance.cardano-visualisation.com/spenders

Most #Cardano DReps are very lenient when analyzing Governance Actions. If we continue like this, it won't end well. Some people don't have spine to say no when they need to.

Congratulations to IO for approving 6 out of 9 proposals! Let's look at the numbers. The approved budget for IO is ₳131,510,093. In dollar terms, at $0.25 per ADA, that's $32.8M. From my perspective, all the important proposals have been approved: ▪️₳27,714,342: IO: Consensus Initiative: ▪️₳13,103,039: IO: Cardano Upgrades ▪️₳3,601,926: IO: DevEx ▪️₳62,134,630: Ensurable Systems ▪️₳13,078,578: High Assurance ▪️₳11,877,575: Enhancing Plutus IO can keep most of the engineers. I heard that IO plans to resubmit the failed proposals. This may not be the final budget. There are still active research (₳32.9M) and Pentad V2 (₳23M) proposals. These have a high chance of approval. In total, it is ~₳56M. According to NCL, it is possible to approve an additional budget totaling ₳150.6M. This is the budget that all active proposals are striving to obtain, whether on-chain or in the Intersect process. These include the Tweag proposal, which will most likely be resubmitted with a 1-year budget. I guess that the team will ask for ₳20M. A liquidity proposal (₳50M) is about to be submitted. Most of the budget will be distributed in on-chain governance. I guess that ₳30M to ₳100M will be distributed in the Intersect process, depending on when the liquidity proposal is submitted and if it is approved. I expect the resubmitted Tweag proposal to be approved. Assuming the liquidity proposal is approved, then in the Intersect process, there can only be approved a budget of about ₳30M to ₳50M. Intersect is asking for ₳25.4M plus additional budget for committees. If DReps support Intersect, there will be almost nothing left for other proposals. Assuming the liquidity proposal is not submitted on time or is not approved, there will be ₳50M more left for others. It is almost certain that Catalyst will not return this year, because there is no budget for it. It would have to be provided by the Cardano Foundation. This is unlikely. This year, small and new builders can only get funding through DAOs: ▪️Innovation & Growth DAO ▪️CB DAO ▪️Tooling DAO, etc I expect there will be efforts to increase NCL. Many DReps are builders, or are close to them. It would have a chance of being approved, but I don't dare to predict the outcome. We have a few exciting weeks ahead of us. Hold on to your hats. It's going to be a ride.

@phillip_pon This doesn't look good; it contradicts your stance over the last few months. Would you like to say something about this?

Claim: Yoroi removed the soft nudge to delegate to Yoroi DRep Fact: I just checked out the Staking section in @YoroiWallet Surprise: "Save Time & Fees by Delegating to Yoroi DRep now. " But it's OK. @emurgo_io is a newcomer to this space.

🧵 Ecosystems do not need a false choice between infrastructure and adoption. Infra matters. Deeply. But #Cardano's next phase of growth should ask a sharper question: how does infrastructure convert into usage, liquidity, integrations, transactions and durable ecosystem activity?

@TheOCcryptobro @IOGroup @IOHK_Charles @RickMcCracken @CardanoFeed What? This proposal has not yet been approved.

#Cardano fam, congrats to my delegators. We, us, saved the @IOGroup research proposal. With our combined 0.62% of voting power we waited to the last moment to vote yes on the proposal: our little voice made the difference. We can rest tonight knowing IMHO we saved Cardano. $ADA

One of the reasons that made me come to Cardano was the care for decentralization that this community had and still has at a reasonable level, but less so than years ago in my view. Decentralization is a necessary mechanism for public blockchains that truly want to make a difference, but without coordination we cannot move forward. Project Catalyst is a good example. Even the "largest" "decentralized" innovation fund in the world has had worrying flaws. So I believe that a layer ownership and execution is necessary to move something forward because, despite the concept of decentralization being beautiful in theory, in practice it involves a minority doing the hard lifting, as Paretto. However, there is a leap between: - Consulate system for emergency executive powers X - Coordination Coordination can set dangerous precedents depending on who is in control of coordinating and how it is done. The last few years of Cardano have had enough problems to warrant skepticism. Our delegation layer is EXTREMELY STICKY; if there's a legitimacy issue, I don't believe delegators will redelegate, this hasn't been happening in the last 2 years. Our system is fragile, and if a consulate system for emergency executive powers comes to power for whatever reason, I have no confidence that our governance will be able to control such a group and have robust mechanisms in place to keep them in check if necessary.

@RodrigoPacini But wouldn't you say coordination isn't effectively centralization? A coordination layer, even if it's not human-led is in my eyes something that "centralizes" information or aggregates it at one point. A master coordinator is someone that ultimately wields a lot of power

Does Cardano need a consulate system for emergency executive powers? One voted in by DReps and one by SPOs. They can be removed at all times, though. In addition, we keep the Constitutional Committee to uphold the Constitution. We need proper checks and balances.

“On-chain governance is enough.” Sure. And one kitchen is enough to cook for the whole city. Big Treasury proposals belong on-chain. Small proposals need a filter before DReps get buried alive. Use the right tool for the right job. Save DRep attention.

@angrycryptoshow Who was it that researched, designed, built, and sold the community on this governance system again?

Innovation & Growth DAO is a funding vehicle for the Cardano community.

@phillewisit No way, the train has already left the station; those who were supposed to deliver governance have failed. They should not be compensated for failures.

Important message from Charles. Let’s not derail funding core development and research in the pursuit of maximum decentralisation. “Changes have to be made to governance” - 💯 We need a managed transition. 2025 and 2026 failed to achieve this, as Intersect took the wrong path. Let’s re-centralise around IO, CF, EMURGO and Intersect (but where members define how it contributes), then over time introduce new institutions. If we slowly decentralise the institutions, we can avoid the Catalyst-like chaos we have had 2 years in a row now.

We cannot let Cardano governance become hostage to vendor threats. If rejecting a bad bundle means losing some people, then so be it. Research matters. But not every research item has the same priority, and the community should be able to decide what deserves funding first. That is exactly why bundling everything together is such a bad governance practice. It forces DReps into artificial compromises. “Approve the whole package or lose everything” is not governance. And I do not want to see Cardano governance become the same kind of shitshow we already see in traditional politics. And this is the same basic logic many people in this community criticized in the context of the CLARITY Act. When lawmakers try to bury controversial provisions inside large bills, add poison-pill amendments, or sneak in clauses that weaken developer protections, the problem is obvious: decision-makers are forced to accept bad trade-offs just to preserve the parts they support. We should not condemn that tactic in government and then normalize the same dynamic inside Cardano treasury governance. To be clear, whether the individual research items inside this IOR bundle are good, bad, useful, wasteful, urgent, or unnecessary is not the point. My point is that bundling everything together forces DReps into compromises, even when they have very different levels of support or priority for the individual research proposals inside the package. That is precisely the point. Some work packages may be critical. Some may be less urgent. Some may deserve full support. Some may need refinement, reduction, or separation. But when everything is bundled together, DReps lose the ability to prioritize properly. This is not a serious way to allocate scarce treasury resources. DReps have been rejecting forced compromises since last year. That is exactly why Intersect had to submit multiple Treasury Withdrawal Governance Actions instead of forcing everything through one massive all-or-nothing package. The compromise here is very real, and Yuta’s own position makes that clear. That is the failure mode. Cardano should not be governed by hostage bundles. If Leios is critical, submit Leios clearly. If quantum resistance is critical, submit quantum resistance clearly. If weaker research work packages need funding, let them compete honestly. But do not turn Cardano’s treasury into a hostage negotiation. If the bundle collapses because the community refuses to accept an all-or-nothing structure, then that is a consequence of the governance design itself — not an attack on any individual contributor, researcher, or team. Important work should be able to stand on its own merits. And if some parts are truly critical, they should survive independent scrutiny and independent approval. That is healthier for governance, healthier for accountability, and ultimately healthier for Cardano itself. If the bundle dies, it dies.

Just a friendly reminder that emurgo used their 1B Ada delegation to vote for a proposal they are involved with (the Pentad V2 proposal when V1 isn’t even finished yet)

@CKCardano Do you have more info/documentation about this?

@RodrigoPacini x.com/CKCardano/stat…

A 50% ADA price drop is a doom-and-gloom framing, not an objective risk model. You are treating a political threat from IOR as if it were a market-certainty scenario, but there is no evidence that “research disruption = 50% price collapse.” Ethereum is a useful counterexample here. In June 2025, the Ethereum Foundation restructured its Protocol R&D division, laid off some staff, and rebranded it as “Protocol.” That was a major research/org event in one of the largest ecosystems in crypto. ETH did not collapse 50%. In fact, the market barely treated it as an existential event. ETH was reported up around 5% the next day, and historical monthly data shows ETH moving from roughly $1.7k–$2.8k in May 2025 to roughly $2.4k–$3.9k in July 2025. So the claim that Cardano rejecting one oversized and bundled IOR proposal could trigger a 50% ADA crash is pure speculation. It may be politically convenient speculation, but it is still speculation. The real issue is governance precedent. If a proposer can bundle valuable research with weakly justified work, then threaten to shut down the valuable parts unless the whole package passes, DReps should not reward that behavior by treating the threat as an objective market risk. That is not risk management. That is governance capture through fear. If Leios and quantum resistance research are truly critical, they should be submitted as focused, defensible, high-priority proposals. The answer to a bad bundle is not to normalize bad bundling forever because someone framed rejection as apocalypse. Cardano needs research. Cardano also needs budget discipline, transparency, and the ability to say no to COERCIVE proposal design and FEAR political tactics.

Disclaimer before someone deliberately pretends not to understand the point or tries to derail it with strawman arguments, which unfortunately seems to happen quite often: “If it dies, it dies” refers to the proposal bundle and the all-or-nothing funding structure, not to any person, contributor, researcher, or team. This is a governance argument against hostage-style bundling and threat-based budget pressure. Nothing more.

@CashAnvil Just for context: CF is requesting 7.8 million ada for the Cardano Summit. EMURGO is requesting 5.07M ada for a TOKEN2049 sponsorship for Cardano. IOG is requesting nearly 200 million ADA for everything they are working on.