Indigenous DAO Toolkit consists of four distinct layers:

1. Foundation layer: Matou Protocol – collective identities, members + permissions that following layers will be built upon. Research and prototype Collective identity primitives, permission system, and develop transport agnostic specification for interoperable coordination. Promote the use of local relay nodes hosted by Indigenous communities to strengthen network resilience.
2. Middle layer: service modules which add additional primitives on top of identity. Design and prototype service modules architecture which provide community-aligned functions used by applications. Co-design several service modules as both exemplars and building blocks necessary for our Application level DAO tools.
3. Application layer: DApps – uses service modules to easily build applications (wallets, dashboards, messaging, treasury management, rules creation, etc). Explore architectural patterns with indigenous communities for culturally aligned governance DApps. Design and implement DAO-focused DApps.
4. Implementation layer: Launch, Training, Support, including CDK (community development kit).

Mātou Protocol is a polycentric identity coordination layer that enables indigenous and place-based communities to define, express, and govern their collectives. It establishes shared language, governance primitives, and contextual logic on which everything else is built. Instead of embedding DIDs or VCs, it allows them to be layered on top of community-defined systems for specific purposes, preserving sovereignty and adaptability.

MatouSDK is the technical resource for developers, providing an implementation of the Protocol, along with tools for developing custom service modules.

MatouCDK is a collection of guides and templates for co-designing, cultural integration frameworks, and implementation playbooks for launching and growing your community system.

This work will involve direct collaboration with indigenous knowledge keepers, leaders and organisers, alongside technical experts to ensure all solutions are both robust and culturally appropriate.

In doing so, this initiative supports Cardano's goals of advancing governance tooling, building SDK’s and increasing adoption, positioning the platform as the leader in decentralised infrastructure fit for purpose for Indigenous and other diverse and unserved communities.

DAOs hold the promise of collective power—but the communities most ready to use them are the ones they’re currently failing.

Designed around hyper-individualism, most DAO infrastructure ignores—or outright crushes—the collective realities of Indigenous groups (or any collective organisations). These groups, which already coordinate billions in ecological and economic value, are decentralised by design and by tradition. They don’t need to be taught how to self-organise. What they need are digital tools that align with how they already operate.

Digital tools built on Westphalian patterns of thinking, born of nation-states — systems emphasising individual ownership, authorship, and top-down control — are fundamentally misaligned with Indigenous ways of organising. They fragment collective identity, embed extractive dynamics, and exclude communities who already steward land, knowledge, and resources through deep relational value systems, decentralised, and intergenerational models. Until DAO tooling respects these principles, it will remain unfit for Indigenous peoples—and for any community that seeks to govern together. In summary, DAO tools are not (yet) fit for purpose.

The missing piece in Cardano’s DAO infrastructure isn’t only more code—it’s a shift in mindset. We need a collective-first architecture built on the principles that Indigenous communities have validated and honed for centuries. A mindset where the group—not the individual—is the fundamental unit of coordination, identity, and governance.

Currently there is no infrastructure within Cardano that truly supports modular, collective-first, and polycentric governance. Existing tools prioritise static, centralised structures over adaptable, community-defined coordination. This absence leaves Indigenous, cooperative, and civic groups without the building blocks they need to steward shared identity, manage intergenerational resources, or scale their governance models from a single hapū (a tribal collective, each with the authority of a sovereign nation) to a wider network of nations.

Without the work proposed here, Cardano risks missing a historic opportunity: to become the first blockchain ecosystem to genuinely support sovereign, place-based, community-led governance—digital infrastructure that reflects the realities of the world we live in, and the world we want to build for Indigenous people. Ultimately, for all people.

Historic & Unique—Indigenous DAO tools to onboard 100s of groups stewarding billions of economic & ecological value. This proposal directly supports the development of essential collective-first infrastructure. It delivers a fully data-sovereign, local-first identity system—standards-aligned to meet the unique needs of Indigenous peoples, cooperatives, and civic groups, and their deeply relational, communitarian values and operating systems. It is designed so that it will always be owned by the people, rent-free—ensuring true autonomy over identity, governance, and infrastructure. By lowering barriers to entry with the Mātou Protocol (a collective identity pattern), and the accompanying community and developer kits (CDK & SDK), Mātou Collective can welcome hundreds of tribal nations—thousands of humans—to the ecosystem. These tools are designed to support both custom technical development that fits community needs, and community development that helps leaders weave people and technology together. For the Cardano community, this proposal offers both strategic and tangible benefits: DAO Tooling: Matou Protocol (the core collective identity pattern), MatouSDK (software development kit), MatouCDK (community development kit) are designed to drastically lower barriers to technical development (supporting custom tech that fits communities) and community development (supporting leaders weaving people and tech together) Adoption: This project aims to on-board Indigenous nations — populations with active economies already coordinating billions in value of indigenous economic activity, specific examples. Innovation: Cardano will be the first major blockchain to offer a pathway to decentralized, culturally rooted, real-world data sovereignty for Indigenous peoples. Research Impact: This project will generate unique field data and unique design insights on how decentralized systems can serve complex governance, identity, and economic needs. Transactions: Increased transaction volume through real-world governance applications, credential verification services, cross-group economic activities, and token investments and exchanges—all mediated through Cardano's infrastructure. These tokenized interactions drive sustainable growth while providing tangible utility for indigenous communities. We're building tools for an existing, rich, reciprocal, multi-stakeholder ecosystem with clear requirements, validated needs—an ecosystem we're part of and uniquely positioned to serve.

This proposal represents Phase 1 of a comprehensive 3-year project. Beginning with laying the technical foundations, we'll establish the groundwork for expanding to additional indigenous First Nations partners in subsequent phases.

IdentityCore: An implementation of the Matou Protocol, a peer-to-peer identity and relationship system that enables groups to define, manage, and coordinate without reliance on centralised infrastructure. Service Modules: Building blocks which empower higher level Dapps, which allow communities to choose how and where their coordination takes place. DAO Apps: Governance, participation, tokenomics, treasury management, and group coordination—flexible enough to reflect diverse use cases, cultures and economic practices. Developer SDKs: Tools and documentation to reduce the complexity of building on Cardano, particularly for culturally aligned and localised applications. CDK – Community design toolkit: Tools, guides and templates to support community design, deployment and onboarding.

The project will be completed across six structured milestones over approximately 12 months:

1. Project Kickoff & Setup: Establishing partnerships with indigenous communities, finalising stakeholder roles, and creating project infrastructure
2. Research & Design Phase: Conducting co-design sessions with community partners to produce a comprehensive requirements library and technical architecture
3. Matou Protocol & Developer SDK MVP: Developing v0.1 of our core identity system with initial SDK and documentation
4. DAO Core Modules MVP: Building governance, membership and treasury management functionality integrated with the identity system
5. Community Toolkit MVP: Initial resources to support tokenomics design, governance implementation, and community engagement and onboarding strategy
6. Full MVP Toolkit Integration: Combining all components into a cohesive product with user testing and refinement
7. Launch of Testnet & Final Deliverables: Public GitHub release, comprehensive documentation, and demonstration webinar

By the conclusion of Phase 1, we will deliver a fully functional MVP deployed on testnet with user guides and technical documentation, enabling communities to evaluate, test, and provide critical feedback before mainnet implementation in subsequent phases. The final deliverables will include a public GitHub release, detailed implementation report, product website, and an investment invitation for future phases of the project.

*Amount in preferred currency is ADA to NZD conversion rate as at time of submission.

Based on a fixed-price contract model, we estimate the total project cost at ₳2,291,088 ADA (approximately $1,145,544 USD) to deliver the complete IDI Toolkit MVP over 12 months. This budget includes encompasses all personnel, operational expenses, and required overhead as follows:

1. Personnel Costs: ₳1,724,400 ADA ($862,200 USD) - 75.3%

2. Operational Expenses: ₳217,200 ADA ($108,600 USD) - 9.5%

• Infrastructure: ₳10,200 ADA ($5,100 USD)
  • System hosting, data storage, transaction costs
• Digital Presence: ₳4,800 ADA ($2,400 USD)
  • Website hosting, domain names, content platforms
• Community Engagement: ₳58,000 ADA ($29,000 USD) - 2.5%
  • Community workshops in rural locations
  • Cultural consultation with tribes
  • Translation services
  • Analytics and survey tools
  • Event management platforms
  • Social media and community outreach
• Travel & Accommodation: ₳90,000 ADA ($45,000 USD) - 3.9%
  • Extensive travel to rural Māori communities
  • Transportation and logistics for remote areas
• Development Tools: ₳17,200 ADA ($8,600 USD)
  • Video editing, design subscriptions, AI tools, project management
• Additional Administrative: ₳37,000 ADA ($18,500 USD)
  • Fiscal host fees, insurance, legal expenses

3. Overhead: ₳349,488 ADA ($174,744 USD) - 15.3%

• Administrative overhead, contingency funding, and risk management

To successfully deliver the research, design, and MVP development of the Indigenous DAO Toolkit within 12 months, we've structured our team and timeline to align with our milestone-based funding approach:

Core Team (6 7 people):

Technical Lead / Architect 0.8 FTE

Oversees technical architecture design and development, ensuring cohesion across technical layers Involved in Milestones 1-6

Smart Contract Developer (Plutus / Aiken) 1.0 FTE

Designs smart contract logic, and ensures Cardano-native compatibility and test-net integration Primary focus during Milestones 3-6

Backend / SDK Developer 1.6 FTE

Builds Core MVP and SDK core interfaces, rules implementation, recovery logic, local-first infrastructure Concentrated involvement during Milestones 3-6

Frontend / DApp Developer 1.0 FTE

Develops developer SDK core interfaces for community setup, memberships, governance and tokenomics Key contributor during Milestones 4-6

Community Researcher / Facilitator 2 FTE

Leads co-design workshops with Māori communities, synthesizes community input into feature requirements Intensive work during Milestones 1-2 and 5

Project Manager / Delivery Lead 0.8 FTE

Coordinates workstreams, tracks milestones, manages documentation and reporting Consistent involvement across Milestones 1-6

Additional Specialists:

UX/UI Designer (0.25 FTE) Interface design during M2-M3 and refinement during M5 Systems Designer (0.25 FTE) Architecture planning during M2 and technical review during M5 Legal/Governance Advisor (consultancy) DAO design validation during M2 and M4 Community advisors & cultural consultants Intensive engagement during M1-M2, feedback during M5

Project Duration & Milestone Alignment:

Total duration: 12 months structured across 6 milestone-based funding phases M1: Project Kickoff & Setup - Month 1 M2: Research & Design Phase - Months 1-3 M3: IdentityCore & Developer SDK MVP - Months 3-6 M4: Service Modules + DAO Apps MVP - Months 6-9 M5: Full MVP Toolkit Integration & Testing - Months 9-11 M6: Launch of Testnet & Final Deliverables - Months 11-12

Loomio: open source, value aligned collective decision-making software Cardano Constitution: Chairing Cardano Constitution Delegate Committee, member of Interim Constitutional Committee Digital Marae Connectivity: development and training across 11 different regions of Aotearoa, New Zealand.

Scuttlebutt: radically distributed, offline-first, p2p social infrastructure Āhau: tribal registries, family trees, cultural archives. (This was our first pass at building foundational collective identity tools in a radically local-first, data-sovereign way.)

Pataka: Community data relays that are trust-less, fully disposable, a desktop app any user can install. Resilience + accessibility layer for Ahau. Dark Crystal: Lowering barriers to entry by transforming secret-key backup into a social-recovery paradigm (see Shamir's Secret Sharing crossed self-sovereign p2p community) ssb-atala-prism: a plugin which added Cardano Verifiable Credentials (Identus) to Āhau, allowing groups to authenticate partner-group members trivially Web Forms: self-hosted custom forms which can be submitted from a web portal, and are transformed into private encrypted messages in a data-sovereign p2p database

TribalDIDs, AtalaSDK, Holder Connection requests: Explorations of Cardano’s technology and ecosystem (AtalaPRISM and Identus specifically). Looking Forward: research to identify best organisational structure to support Identity and Indigenous Digital Infrastructure.

TribalDAO: Research and Design for executing the instantiation of Mātou Collective DAO, tokenomics, etc K'aute Pasifika Healthcare Provider: Focused on putting health data (see identity) in the hands of community first. Tauhokohoko: With Te Kotahi centre of Māori Research Excellence at Waikato University to enhance Indigenous trade. Cook Islands Tairea Enua Trust: Supporting the establishment of a collective land trust. Whangaroa Papa Hapū: Facilitating reparations with the British Crown for 28 hapū (tribal groups) of their region. Te Riingi Marae: Based in Tautoro in the Far North of Aotearoa, is the collective home to the hapū of Ngāti Moerewa, Ngāti Rangi, Ngāti Whakahotu, Ngāti Kiriahi, and Te Ngare Hauata—a traditional and trusted space for nurturing spiritual, physical, cultural, and social wellbeing. Mātou Collective will support Marae Trustees with DAO expertise, enabling them to use Indigenous DAO Toolbox to safely and securely organise their hapū’s economic and cultural affairs.

While this proposal focuses on the research and development phase of a beta release of the Indigenous DAO Toolkit, it will also lay the foundation for long-term sustainability and community-led stewardship of the tools via our Indigenous Digital Infrastructure DAO called Mātou Collective.

Mātou Collective DAO will govern continued development, deployment, and support of the Indigenous DAO toolkit. It will operate a token-based governance model and manage a treasury that will fund future development, maintenance, and community initiatives. The work to instantiate the Mātou Collective DAO has already begun using Web2 tools. A current project TribalDAOs is co-creating the community processes for this technology-centred DAO with support from Kaumatua (Elders), Cultural Advisors and community.

The treasury will be sustained through a multi-source funding strategy, including:

Grants from technology development foundations and research and innovation funds, particularly those aligned with digital sovereignty, open-source development, and Indigenous infrastructure. Investment from individuals and groups who recognise the generational significance of this project and are committed to realising the opportunities of empowering the Indigenous economy through fit-for-purpose infrastructure. Revenue generated through the use of the toolkit, including application and transaction fees, hosted DAO services, identity verification, smart contract deployments, education programs, and consulting. Partnerships with ethical blockchain networks, institutions, and governments that support Indigenous digital rights and self-determination.

Through this structure, the Indigenous DAO Toolkit will not only be designed with sustainability in mind—it will be embedded in a living, evolving ecosystem governed by the very communities it aims to serve.

We are actively gathering endorsements from the wider community. You can find the latest endorsements on our website at https://www.matou.nz/indigenous-dao-toolkit-endorsement/. This page will be continuously updated as more endorsements come in.

None.