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.

✨ The #SDGBlockchainAccelerator results are also a story of structure. This journey shows how challenges moved through matchmaking, acceleration, validation, demos, pilots, and post-acceleration, creating a practical route from demand to deployable solutions. Find out more about the Accelerator journey 👇 innovation.eurasia.undp.org/sdg-blockchain… @ChainforGood | @EMURGOLabs | @Cardano_CF | @Catalyst_onX | @StellarOrg | @flock_io | @SuiNetwork

The @Oraclecharli3 Hackathon kicks off today. The Cardano Foundation and Project Catalyst are co-sponsoring with 40,000 $ADA in prizes across five winners. Three days. Real builds. Real impact.

BREAKING: CHARLi3 Hackathon x DRAPER DRAGON Hackathon winners get to directly pitch the @DraperDragon team with for the opportunity to get additional funding from the Orion Fund. Thank you to our sponsors: Project Catalyst (@Catalyst_onX), and The Cardano Foundation (@Cardano_CF).

Cardano Oracle Hackathon is quickly approaching on Thu April 16th. This event is made possible because of Project Catalyst and the support of the Cardano community. 🙏 Thank you to the @Catalyst_onX team for your years of contributions and thankless service to the community. Excited to see what the community will build!

Gm Cardano Pleased to say @Catalyst_onX funding distribution is underway. Thanks for your patience and understanding. Let's go 🚀

🚨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.