This is a must, I fully support this

I’d back a five-year @inputoutput proposal. I trust devs, the leadership and their track record speaks for itself. I look forward to other teams demonstrating KPIs to share in more of this budget next year.

Technical Steering Committee Comments (Part 1):

The TSC provides the following advice as a brief summary to aid the DReps and community in forming a budget proposal. A proper evaluation would take significantly longer than the time available: the TSC anticipates that such a review will be necessary prior to agreeing any contracts. This may, for example, involve determining milestones and timelines, where these are necessary or otherwise revising the original proposal.

Recommendation:

Obtain clarification where needed, including on costs. Split each sub-project out for independent review/prioritisation by the DReps. Require proper goals and milestones for each sub-project. Reduce excessive budget items.

Detailed Comments:

The IOE proposal covers $48M of spend at a rate of $299,000 per developer year (FTE), for a total of approximately 140 developer years of effort on a time and materials basis. It is a consortium bid. It covers some, but not all, elements of the 2025 core infrastructure roadmap, the majority (but not all) of the core infrastructure maintenance needs, plus some items that are not classified as core. It does not explicitly cover required integration, rollout or coordination. Technical interactions with the community and support via Intersect’s Technical Working Groups, the Security Council, TSC, OSC, Parameter Committee, workshops and other mechanisms also need to be made explicit.

Core Roadmap:

Core roadmap elements that are covered by the proposal and that are considered as high priority by the community include:

Plutus Core Roadmap. Initial Implementation of Ouroboros Leios. Hydra improvements. Mithril improvements. Ledger-HD/LSM. Revised Stake Pool Incentives Scheme.

Technical Steering Committee Comments (Part 1):

The TSC provides the following advice as a brief summary to aid the DReps and community in forming a budget proposal. A proper evaluation would take significantly longer than the time available: the TSC anticipates that such a review will be necessary prior to agreeing any contracts. This may, for example, involve determining milestones and timelines, where these are necessary or otherwise revising the original proposal.

Recommendation:

Obtain clarification where needed, including on costs. Split each sub-project out for independent review/prioritisation by the DReps. Require proper goals and milestones for each sub-project. Reduce excessive budget items.

Detailed Comments:

The IOE proposal covers $48M of spend at a rate of $299,000 per developer year (FTE), for a total of approximately 140 developer years of effort on a time and materials basis. It is a consortium bid. It covers some, but not all, elements of the 2025 core infrastructure roadmap, the majority (but not all) of the core infrastructure maintenance needs, plus some items that are not classified as core. It does not explicitly cover required integration, rollout or coordination. Technical interactions with the community and support via Intersect’s Technical Working Groups, the Security Council, TSC, OSC, Parameter Committee, workshops and other mechanisms also need to be made explicit.

Core Roadmap:

Core roadmap elements that are covered by the proposal and that are considered as high priority by the community include:

Plutus Core Roadmap. Initial Implementation of Ouroboros Leios. Hydra improvements. Mithril improvements. Ledger-HD/LSM. Revised Stake Pool Incentives Scheme.

We need this!

This is a no brainer: IOG has done a great work and has delivered. Now we are about to harvest our sweetest fruits: we can´t stop the train now. You will always have my vote guys

All- Thank you for thoughtful feedback and questions. We appreciate the engagement on our proposal. Please find further clarifying details on our Cardano Forum post here:

https://forum.cardano.org/t/further-details-on-the-io-engineering-budget-proposal/145422.

Thank you again!

Seems ok, don't break it up, people won't understand it broken up

let's make this happen!!! Is a lot of money, but i think this will put Cardano at the best spot in the market, an unmach tecnology, the best bedrock for the future of the project. Yes, yes and yes.

Conditionally YES - The contents of the proposal should be rationally broken down, DRep should vote on each item, and the results should be reflected in the proposal. In order to keep the total expenditure for 2025 within 200M, please separate items that can be spent in 2026 into items that can be spent without any problems and items that should be spent by December 2025.

Anastasia Labs possesses strong technical expertise in Haskell and the Cardano infrastructure, making them a highly capable team. Developing a solution to improve TPS (transactions per second) and manage the data flow from Layer 1 (L1) would be a strategic move. We would like to understand: • The estimated timeline for completion • The ongoing operational costs associated with the solution Brazil / São Paulo on-line workshop. Vote: Yes

IOG has been an excellent vendor, consistently delivering high-quality products free of bugs or security issues over the years. However, we currently lack the necessary budget to fund all planned developments. Greater transparency—such as clear cost estimates for projects like Leios—would help us make more informed decisions. Additionally, with IOG prioritizing Midnight’s timeline, we’re curious about their capacity to deliver on other commitments like Hydra, Leios, and other promised initiatives in the pipeline. Could they provide updates on these projects? Brazil / São Paulo on-line workshop. Yes

I think I will ultimately vote YES on this once I see that sufficient breakdown-specific temperature checks with DRep have been conducted and that those temperature checks are properly reflected in the proposal.

I would like to have the IOG proposal budget items broken down as much as possible in the reconciliation workshops and have each DRep vote on a temperature check.

I don't think it's necessary to split up the proposal and resubmit it in Govtool or submit multiple budget info actions separately.

It's probably not productive to have a general discussion about whether the total amount of IOG's proposal is high or low. Let's break it down and do a temperature check of DRep to see what is necessary and what is not.

The Buenos Aires, Argentina Workshop acknowledges that Input Output has demonstrated a solid track record, expertise, and transparency. However, the following recommendations are made:

• Continue working on node architecture to enhance scalability and its broader ecosystem impact.

• Establish incentives for knowledge transfer.

• Increase transparency by implementing clear criteria for budgeting and procurement.

• Coordinate more closely with other areas of the ecosystem to assess the feasibility of implementations—for example, in Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI).

It is strongly recommended to improve communication with the non-technical community. Effectively conveying this transparency is essential in the era of decentralized governance, as it can help mitigate misunderstandings that might otherwise cause friction during budget approval processes.

Taking into account IOG's past contributions and extensive experience, we fully support this proposal

How does community vote on which items they want funded plus which conditions they want met before funding is granted? We are to give IOG more than 100 million ADA when we don't even have transparency about how much ADA is left from 2.4 billion genesis ADA? That needs to be the first condition. Second is that any new funding needs to be transparent. As for the line items, if the community wanted to trim the fat to reduce amount of funding for this proposal, how is this pushed for? Is IOG open to feedback?

The Cardano infrastructure was created by the IOHK engineering team and no other entity has yet shown the prowess necesarry to replace the CORE creators development teams. I find value in the continuation of the maintenance under IOHK until otherwise proven a necessity to change.

This proposal is essential for the future of Cardano.

✅ Yes – A Structural Investment for Cardano’s Future

This proposal is not merely a set of feature enhancements. Rather, it represents a structural and strategic investment aimed at evolving Cardano into a nation-scale infrastructure platform.

It goes beyond temporary technical competition with Ethereum, Solana, or Polkadot, and instead advances Cardano’s unique vision: building a sustainable and formally grounded blockchain foundation for real-world adoption.

This proposal delivers on three core pillars: • ✅ Decentralization: A structure that enables broad participation from diverse SPOs and development vendors • ✅ Resilience: A robust infrastructure enabled by lightweight nodes and a modular architecture • ✅ Utility: Improved usability and responsiveness for dApp developers and end users

I highly value how this proposal integrates these elements at a high level and therefore cast my Yes vote in full support.

How IO select Labs partners?

This budget proposal is in competition for a similiar budget proposal in the Core category from the Intersect TSC. In choosing between the two, I am inclined to choose the one that is cheaper and more transparent, assuming the same level of quality. As it currently stands, the TSC proposal seems to be "winning" in that regard.

I have some questions for IOG in that regard:

1. Can you elaborate on the cost breakdown and deliverables for the "Maintenance and Support" line item? 14.6 million USD seems high for maintanence work, especially when something like Leios, which arguably one of the most complex software projects to date, is less than half of that.
2. Can you elaborate on the cost breakdown and deliverables for the "Revised Stake Pool Incentive Scheme" line item? There have been community efforts, CIPs, and ideas for several years about things that could be changed related to SPO incentives. And even now there is a community working group doing some of this work for free. 1.3 million USD seems high for something like this without clear deliverables.

Related to both of these questions is the fact that the TSC's proposal is currently the cheaper of the two. Some clarification on at least these two line items might go a long way to justify the additional costs that IOG is asking for.

1. If TSC's Budget is adopted, will IOG participate in the public bidding held by TSC?

2. Are there plans to create a separate Cardonao Budget proposal outlining items that are outside the scope of the TSC Budget but are within the scope of this proposal?

Supportive in general of many of the items in this proposal, but have concerns over lumping everything into a single proposal for a single binary yes / no vote. Would ideally like to see large budget proposals like this broken down into goals / projects / teams with separate budgets. Maybe a line item capability for voting would be useful. Have not voted yet at the time of this comment.

While there are many aspects of this I'd like to see, it's difficult to judge how much of these are truly important right now. If I were to break down maybe must haves or potential key critical components vs would like to haves, I can come up with 7 or 8 in this list which could save a few million (Leios, Multiple Node, Minotaur, Ledger-HD, KES, Plutus Core, Tiered Pricing, Maintenance/Support).

Regarding technology, it contains exactly what Cardano needs and what IOE is responsible for. The only thing I would like to see there is the implementation of a one-shot signature. However, this is a negligible detail.

I found these things in the document interesting and have further questions:

• It mentions the development costs of individual items for the year. It lacks a delivery date and a specification of what part will be delivered in one year. • Many people criticize the high maintenance costs. Maintenance also applies to the new codebase, so this is justifiable. I did not investigate how big the technology debt is. • The costs of some items seem enormous to me. For example, the Property Based Testing Tool for 2.3M USD or the Cardano Node Architecture Refresh for 2M USD. • The total requested amount is 48.4M USD. I would like to know more about the process of converting ADA to USD. For example, what will happen if the price of ADA is only 0.3 USD at the time of conversion? IOE would need half of NCL (it is not yet clear what NCL will be approved).

In general, I think IOG should provide more details.

I was mostly concerned with whether the costs are justifiable. The document says that 140-160 FTEs are expected over the proposed 12-month development period.

I calculated annual salary and overhead costs of 60% for 160 employees for the given average salary.

Average salary | Total costs 100,000 USD | 25.6M USD 200,000 USD | 51.2M USD 250,000 USD | 64M USD 300,000 USD | 76.8M USD

It seems that the average salary of employees will be around 200,000 USD. This is fair considering these figures:

• Median annual salary for an IT professional worldwide: $100,000 • In the US, it is: $140,000 (but can $240,000) • Typical full-stack developer: $65,000 • Uniswap is looking for devs for: $230,000 • Aptos is looking for devs for: $260,000 • Contractors cost 2x to 3x more than a typical employee.

It depends on where the developers are from. I don’t expect them all to be US-based and contractors. If all the developers were from Europe, I think the total cost could be $30M.

We all want the best available developers and researchers working on Cardano.

Cardano is developed using formal methods. That’s expensive.

I vote YES, but I would like to know more details about where the individual teams are from and how many of them will be working on specific projects.