This proposal funds the first phase of ada.eco: Cardano’s human interface — a modular coordination stack to reduce onboarding friction, surface underutilized ecosystem value, and enable trust-based collaboration across communities, individual contributors, timezones and cultures.

The system includes:

1. Platform Layer – Ecosystem Mapping + Matching

• Maps projects, contributors, and needs
• Matches users, builders, and collaborators
• Utilises human and augmented intelligence
• Delivers guided, interactive onboarding flows

2. Content Layer – Shared Storytelling + Visual Identity

• Creates explainers, founder features, and thematic pathways
• Provides brand assets and templates for ecosystem reuse
• Curates contribution journeys linked to mission and region

3. Events Layer – Global Coordination + ada.day

• Runs a distributed calendar of ecosystem events linked across timezones
• Enables co-branding for regional and vertical initiatives
• Leverages Ada Lovelace Day alongside its organisers (women and friends of the team) and its non-Cardano, but tech-first global community of women which has been growing since 2009 as an activation for Cardano’s own annual ada.day as the innaugural annual celebration of community governance across time zones

Prototyping will focus on a high-impact demographic: women — the most powerful, reliable financial decision-makers globally and natural community builders. Infrastructure and insight from this cohort will be modular, open, and extendable across the entire ecosystem.

The project activates, integrates and coordinates tested and trusted tools and communities:

• Cryptofluency contributes guided onboarding content and creates user experience journeys tailored for non-technical users enabling them to make use of what Cardano has to offer.
• Andamio delivers community-tailored onboarding journeys through Discord-based wallet creation, on-chain project tracking and treasury management, flexible user identity, and educational credentials. Its on-chain data and governance-ready architecture supports dynamic learning and contribution networks.
• One Up One Down provides AI-enabled peer-matching, building non-fungible relationships and distributed mentorship flows across values-aligned women’s networks and beyond.
• Venture Centre supports smart hubs — interest, industry vertical or theme-based, community-run groups focused on entrepreneurial venture building skill, tool, and knowledge sets which when combined with access to networks, conducting use case or industry-specific discovery, experimentation and iterative activities moves people towards sustainable ventures.

Together, these partners are OGs of the ecosystem who represent a cross-section of Cardano’s proven real-world traction. This proposal funds the delivery of research, platform prototyping, coordinated user flows, and co-branded digital infrastructure to align and integrate these services, solutions and capabilities into a decentralised human interface for the human network delivering discoverable, usable ecosystem entry points and pathways to participation.

This is not just an event series or content campaign. It’s the connective layer that makes those investments visible, valuable, and scalable by providing access to a stream of real world context and requirements to ensure user needs are met.

By building infrastructure that listens at the edges and connects what works, ada.eco turns ecosystem fragmentation into a network of purpose, participation, and progress.

Cardano has built some of the most principled and future-resilient infrastructure in the blockchain space. Yet what was envisioned as a movement feels stalled right now. The ecosystem is heavy with unrealised potential — not because of a lack of technology, but because of a lack of connectivity between the people, stories, and efforts required to bring that technology to life.

Across the network, the fractures are not technical.

They are relational.

What we are experiencing is not due to malice or incompetence — its because Cardano’s social infrastructure has not kept pace with its technical one.

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Fragmentation and Fatigue

At every layer of the ecosystem, the same patterns repeat:

• Builders are lacking clear signals about what to align with, who to build with, or how their work fits into the larger picture.
• Users encounter scattered tools, jargon, and fractured onboarding experiences that fail to meet them with clarity or continuity.
• Influencers, educators, and grassroots organisers are left to carry the public narrative — unsupported, under-resourced, and increasingly disillusioned. Many report feeling not only unseen, but untrusted — with their community insight often overridden or dismissed in favor of top-down messaging, generic campaigns, or assumptions made by actors far removed from the audiences they serve. Surveys from past Catalyst funding rounds, workshops, and community retrospectives consistently surface this disconnect: that those closest to real users are often the least empowered to shape how Cardano shows up in the world.
• DReps and funding bodies are asked to make high-stakes decisions in an environment of limited visibility, fragmented context, and a lack of shared strategic frame.
• Communities on the margins — particularly those who should be best served by Cardano’s mission — are struggling to find a way in. Despite aligning most closely with the network’s stated values, their efforts are often sidelined as peripheral, performative, or lacking “real impact”. A perception that is shaped more by bias and short-term optics than by any meaningful assessment of strategic value.

The result is a visible erosion of energy, clarity, cohesion and ultimately trust.

There is no shared map. No connective tissue. No unifying arc. What we have instead is mission rhetoric without the infrastructure to realise it — recognition without resourcing, and vision without mechanisms to increase participation.

Despite the excellence of Cardano’s infrastructure, the network is disjointed and the consequences are multiplying.

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A Human Layer That Can’t Be Seen

Unlike code, people don’t automatically connect, compose, or scale.

The human layer is complex, emotional, contextual and without visibility into how people, projects, and purpose interrelate, that layer remains invisible to itself.

Cardano is rich with effort but poor in connective insight.

Its hard, even for insiders, to know:

• Who is doing what.
• How it fits together.
• Where the gaps and duplications lie.
• What the network, as a whole, is becoming.

As a result, the experience of participating in Cardano is often one of incoherence, especially for those arriving from the outside. Instead of a movement they can understand and contribute to, they see a maze.

This is an onboarding gap — a symptom of a system that hasn’t yet closed the feedback loop with its future users.

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The Culture Reflects the Architecture

The absence of this necessary relational infrastructure has consequences that extend beyond individual frustration. It has created a cultural feedback loop of distrust, misinterpretation, and misalignment.

• Disputes emerge faster than collaboration.
• Visibility is confused with influence.
• Coordination is confused with centralisation or worse, an attempt to take out any competition.
• Power is either too diffuse to be actionable or too opaque to be trusted.

This environment makes high-leverage work harder to do and harder to see. Talented contributors leave. Newcomers hesitate.

The community becomes preoccupied with internal friction rather than external opportunity.

The architecture of the ecosystem — fragmented, opaque, and underspecified — is shaping the culture in its image.

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Marketing That Misses the Moment

In the absence of internal cohesion, our outward messaging has become reactive, generic, and misaligned.

The ethos of Cardano — to “make the world work better for all” — is not consistently reflected in how we communicate who we are, who we serve, or why we matter. But it’s not just a messaging issue. It’s a behavioral one. The values we claim are not always visible in the ways we show up, collaborate, or interact. Recognition, inclusion, and support often follow opaque or unspoken rules. Newcomers encounter social architectures they can’t read. Those already contributing struggle to find reinforcement for values-aligned behavior.

The result is a growing gap between our stated intent and our lived culture — and without structures to surface and reinforce the kinds of interaction we want more of, that gap only widens. We are actually making it harder on ourselves by taking steps backward into previous patterns we know don’t work the old way and not in whats emerging.

Instead of leaning into the real-world needs Cardano is uniquely positioned to address, marketing efforts drift toward the tropes of other ecosystems: speed, speculation, superficial growth metrics.

This blurs Cardano’s differentiation.

It reduces our credibility.

And it undermines the very mission that sets us apart.

This is not simply a branding issue.

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Ethos at Risk

At Cardano’s heart is a radical promise: to serve those underserved.

To prioritize long-term stewardship over short-term gain.

To be the infrastructure for a better world, not just a faster ledger.

But the current landscape of the ecosystem makes this promise harder to uphold.

We are not surfacing and resourcing the work that lives up to that mission.

We are not organising around the values we claim to hold.

We are not doing what others won’t — because we can’t see how.

The people most aligned with Cardano’s mission — women, communities in the Global South, cooperative builders, public-good creators — are still largely left to onboard themselves, without targeted support, strategic invitation, or clear pathways.

In trying to serve everyone, we are serving few well.

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Complexity Without Context

As Cardano’s ecosystem grows in volume and velocity, so does its complexity.

But without relational metadata — context about how efforts relate, build upon, or diverge from each other — complexity becomes a liability, not a strength.

Efforts become duplicative.

Opportunities go unnoticed.

Decisions are made in the dark.

The network can’t see the landscape it’s shaping — not for lack of care, but for lack of a map that shows where we all are, which way we’re facing, how we connect, and where we’re going. It can’t recognise what it doesn’t know, because it struggles to see beyond itself.

Initiatives like the DRep Collective’s “Ecosystem Human Interoperability Metadata Standards” are an important step toward internal coherence: they aim to help internal actors better understand ecosystem structure, stakeholder relationships, and proposal flows. They are self-referential by design, focused inward, on the systems that exist.

What’s still missing is a complementary, outward-facing layer, a way to make Cardano intelligible and accessible to those not yet in the room. A people-first layer of context. A research-driven approach to understanding the human signals that shape growth at the edges — insight into how people encounter Cardano, what motivates them to engage, and where the friction lies.

No matter how structured our metadata, it won’t tell us how trust is built, or where meaning gets lost.

No matter how large the community grows, it will always be outnumbered by the knowledge, talent, legitimacy and possibility still sitting outside the ecosystem.

And no matter how detailed our governance patterns, they won’t show us why people arrive, why they stay, or why they leave.

We don’t have a system for observing emergence at the edges.

We don’t have an interface that makes Cardano discoverable to the people it was built for.

Until we do, we’ll keep mistaking momentum for coherence and confusing internal order with external relevance.

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Misused and Misunderstood Technology

Ironically, many of the primitives needed to support relational infrastructure already exist but they are not being recognised, resourced, or coordinated for this purpose.

• Matching engines for communities.
• Credentialing and identity stacks.
• Social graphs and trust signals.
• Reputation systems.
• Learning content and onboarding flows tested in other contexts.
• AI systems already trained to optimise engagement — but not yet aligned to optimize integrity, inclusion, or collective learning.
• A global ecosystem of women—natural networkers, meaning-makers, who are part of the 89% of the world’s economic decision-makers—consistently underserved by systems not designed with their motivations or social intelligence in mind.

These technologies are functional — but functionally siloed. They’re often trapped in their original use case, undervalued for their broader ecosystem utility, or misaligned with the prevailing narrative about what qualifies as “core infrastructure.”

And the same is true for certain user groups. Entire communities — like women, whose social intelligence, networked behaviour, and decision making power could drive adoption and coherence — remain peripheral to system design and under-engaged by default.

The result is a network that has what it needs — but cannot see it, scale it, or coordinate it.

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A Slow Erosion of Trust and Momentum

The longer this persists, the more fragile the ecosystem becomes.

• Contributors disengage.
• Strategic opportunities are missed.
• Proposals are funded without the context to assess their systemic value beyond TPS or TVL.
• Cardano remains harder to explain, harder to join, and harder to love.

The revolution slows.

Not because we don’t have the right parts.

But because we never built the relationships that allow them to move together.

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The central problem this proposal addresses is not a gap in technology — but a gap in relational infrastructure.

Cardano’s biggest challenges — from onboarding and adoption, to visibility and legitimacy — stem from the absence of systems that make human context legible: the motivations, constraints, and social dynamics that shape how people engage (or don’t) with the ecosystem.

Without that layer, friction compounds.

Effort fragments and real-world relevance stays out of reach.

This isn’t just a problem of internal coordination — it’s a problem of external connection.

We don’t just struggle to see ourselves. We struggle to understand how we are seen — and why that matters.

Until we build the capacity to learn from those not yet in the room, Cardano risks mistaking internal progress for collective movement.

And that is how a system falls out of sync with the world it was meant to change.

Unifying Cardano’s Growth Layer Through ada.eco its Onboarding Infrastructure and Requirements Gathering Capability

When implemented, this proposal delivers a foundational shift in how Cardano approaches adoption, onboarding, visibility, and coordination — not as isolated challenges, but as interconnected elements of a resilient, people-powered growth engine.

1. A Modular, Community-Owned Interface for Coordinated Entry to Cardano

Benefit: Reduces friction, confusion, and fragmentation for new users, builders, and contributors.

ROI: Increases retention, accelerates onboarding, and lowers the cost of user acquisition across all projects.

Today, entering Cardano feels like showing up to a city with no map, no welcome center, and no clear way to find your people.

ada.eco solves this by providing a modular, community-owned interface that:

• Matches participants with relevant opportunities,
• Guides them through interactive onboarding flows, and
• Showcases real examples of people participating across the ecosystem.

This coordinated entry point serves:

• New users seeking meaning, purpose, or utility.
• Builders and founders looking for collaborators, funding, or visibility.
• DReps and community leaders who need insight into where value is being created.

It’s not a campaign. It’s infrastructure — built to scale human connection across the network.

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2. A Research-Driven, Test it Before You Build It Disciplined Path to Scalable Adoption That Minimizes Risk

Benefit: Produces concrete insight and validated prototypes before scaling — ensuring Treasury funds support what works, not just what’s envisioned.

ROI: Maximizes learning per dollar spent, avoids premature build-outs, and allows other ecosystem actors to reuse findings and components.

This proposal doesn’t rush to build a single monolithic platform. It starts with a research-first methodology: mapping user journeys, identifying adoption friction, and testing lightweight prototypes that can be iterated, forked, or integrated elsewhere.

This disciplined approach:

• Surfaces real user needs before locking in architecture.
• Feeds learning into other ecosystem projects, including wallet teams, onboarding flows, and governance tooling.
• Will enable the community to make allocations from the Treasury based on identified needs not speculative builds.

The result is infrastructure that grows out of insight, not assumption — and that can evolve as the ecosystem does.

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3. A Marketplace for Mission-Aligned Collaboration

Benefit: Unlocks latent value across the ecosystem by revealing who is working on what, where help is needed, and how to plug in.

ROI: Increases cross-project leverage, reduces duplicated effort, and enables better funding decisions.

Cardano already has talent, tools, and traction — but they remain siloed. ada.eco’s platform layer makes this value visible by mapping the ecosystem’s people, projects, and needs. It acts as a coordination stack — a digital interface layer that enables trust, proximity, and collaboration at scale.

This directly benefits:

• Ecosystem contributors who spend hours trying to find alignment or visibility.
• Proposal reviewers and DReps making funding decisions without a systemic view.
• Funded projects whose long-term impact depends on connection and context, not just capital.
• Influencers who need a more compelling story to tell.

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4. A Real-Time Feedback Loop for Adoption Insight

Benefit: Brings community intelligence to the surface — surfacing signals from the edge as to “What works?” and feeding them back into ecosystem learning.

ROI: Community has clear answers to the question which allows for better governance, smarter funding, and more adaptive infrastructure design.

Unlike protocol-level telemetry, ada.eco captures qualitative insight from the human layer: Why do people join Cardano? What do they struggle with? What keeps them here, or pushes them away? These signals don’t exist in a dashboard yet — but they are essential for building inclusive infrastructure. It enables us to avoid the trap of internal validation loops by capturing real-world context from those not yet in the room — ensuring our systems evolve with, not apart from, the world.

This benefits:

• Governance actors looking to understand ecosystem trends beyond transaction counts.
• Onboarding teams needing real-time adoption data to adjust flows and strategies.
• Tooling and wallet developers designing UX without full knowledge of user motivation.

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5. A Brand and Story Engine that Reflects Cardano’s True Value

Benefit: Builds a shared narrative infrastructure that connects projects and people through values — not just features.

ROI: Multiplies the reach of individual efforts by embedding them in a cohesive, emergent, ecosystem story.

ada.eco includes a shared visual identity system and content toolkit that gives projects a way to plug into a broader, values-aligned ecosystem narrative. This isn’t about centralising messaging — it’s about amplifying real-world signals and making them legible to broader audiences.

This directly benefits:

• Underrepresented projects and regions who often get left out of centralised marketing efforts.
• Community marketers and educators looking for tools to tell more coherent stories.
• Global audiences who need a more human, accessible entry points into Cardano’s purpose.

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6. An Adoption-Focused Ecosystem Built on Existing Momentum

Benefit: Connects existing initiatives: Andamio, OneUpOneDown, Cryptofluency and Venture Centre into navigable growth layer which guides newcomers to the internal services (like Catalyst), helpers (like the TSC), repo’s and resources.

ROI: Builds on already-funded, already-working infrastructure to generate new, synergistic value.

This proposal does not ask to reinvent onboarding, reputation, or identity systems — it asks to connect those built already by long-standing members of the ecosystem with projects like:

• Andamio, activating community collaboration, democratizing credential issuance, and providing modular project management infrastructure that enables mission-aligned teams to do their best work.
• OneUpOneDown, building women-led peer support networks and ML augmented matching.
• Cryptofluency, demystifying the new opportunities for learning in a decentralized space and building content models which underpin a knowledge ecology others can adopt to create their own patterns to share what they know using the best of Cardano technology.
• Venture Centre, cultivating smart hubs of experts and ventures coordinated around interest, theme or vertical with tools to use at in-person and virtual events that bring a groups ideas into a coherant whole that can turn into the basis for a plan to journey forth.

ada.eco creates the layer that brings these efforts together, giving the ecosystem a way to see itself as a whole — and act as one and all.

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ROI for the Treasury and the Community

This proposal isn’t a branding exercise. ada.eco is a leverage play. A strategic infrastructure investment with measurable returns across 6, 12, 24, and 36-month horizons.

We are asking for just 0.5% of the Treasury’s available funds to build an adoption platform that solves one of Cardano’s most urgent and persistent challenges: the gap between technical capability and human coordination.

Make no mistake — this is not a cultural “nice-to-have.”

It’s a commercial imperative.

The initial focus is sharp: women, the world’s most powerful financial decision-makers and community builders — a market largely untapped by blockchain ecosystems. But the infrastructure is generalizable. What we build for this demographic can be adapted for every user group: developers, artists, educators, activists — and the crypto-native, infrastructure focused audiences.

By funding ada.eco, the Treasury unlocks:

Short-Term ROI

• Validated onboarding models that reduce user acquisition costs across the ecosystem.
• Mapped insights into user motivations, blockers, and pathways to participation.
• Reusable components for matching, messaging, and storytelling — available to all projects.
• Clearer decision-making inputs for DReps evaluating proposals with user-facing elements.

Medium-Term ROI

• A shared interface layer that connects projects, people, and value — reducing duplication.
• More effective allocation of Treasury funds based on live data and requirements gathered, not assumptions.
• Retention and advocacy frameworks that grow long-term contributors, not short-term users.
• Onboarding infrastructure that scales with Catalyst, governance, and marketing initiatives.

Long-Term ROI

• Ecosystem-wide narrative coherence that strengthens Cardano’s position in the market and honours the diversity of community, its needs and use cases.
• Replicable adoption architecture for regional, demographic, or thematic growth strategies.
• Reduced burn on siloed marketing, onboarding, and community-building efforts.
• Stronger legitimacy and visibility with external partners, governments, and institutions.
• A history of the patterns, as they emerge, that can be observed and analysed over time to understand their roots and fruits.

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ada.eco Logic Model: Social-Infrastructure for an ADA-loving Ecosystem

Inputs

Treasury funding for research and platform prototyping - Collaboration between existing projects (Andamio, OneUpOneDown, Cryptofluency, Venture Centre) - Community contributors, content creators, ecosystem mappers, especially women-led networks - Existing onboarding, identity, content, learning and coordination tools.

Activities

Conduct human-centered research to surface adoption pathways and friction points with an initial focus on women as an under-engaged but high-impact market - Configure peer, purpose and project-matching and onboarding flows with women-led communities - Build and test modular platform components: mapping, onboarding, matching, storytelling - Design visual identity and content toolkit for ecosystem use - Host ecosystem co-design sessions and early-stage events - Conduct activation focused on onboarding via recognised global event - Deliver launch event on anniversary of the world’s delegates signing the Constitution and commencement of community governance.

Outputs

ada.eco prototype live and community-tested - Ecosystem map: people, projects, and pathways - Interactive onboarding and matching flows - Shared brand assets and content tools - Narrative playbook for ecosystem storytelling - Community spaces, linked across time-zones sharing stories of ada’s use in real lives - data and analytics.

Short-Term Outcomes

Easier onboarding for new users and contributors - Better visibility for underrepresented projects - Increased cross-project collaboration - New, shared language for ecosystem identity and legitimacy - Increased participation from women onboarding into the Cardano ecosystem - Lowered onboarding costs and higher retention for values-aligned users - Replicable model for other groups.

Long-Term Outcomes

Higher user retention and contributor activation - Treasury proposals supported by clearer visibility into what’s working and what’s still neede - A unified, values-aligned interface for ecosystem coordination - Cardano seen as more human, navigable, and globally relevant – A collective of female ambassadors equipped to be stewards of the ecosystem and a place they can invite their friends – A resilient, people-powered coordination layer that adapts over time.

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ada.eco doesn’t compete with other proposals — it connects them.

It is a modular layer that makes the Cardano ecosystem legible, accessible, and navigable. It brings coherence without centralisation. And it gives the Treasury a long-overdue mechanism to measure and multiply the value of its investments in people-powered infrastructure.

This is how we make Cardano work for the people it was built to serve — and ensure it can keep learning, adapting, and coordinating at scale.

ada.eco – a human interface for our human network.

1.0 Vision and Overview

The vision for ada.eco is to establish a modular coordination stack that supports the onboarding, storytelling, matching and measurement across Cardano’s human network. Through a research-driven, real-life story-centered approach, ada.eco will deliver a scalable, values-aligned platform for network-wide visibility, accessibility, participation, and trust.

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2.0 Technical Pillars and Deliverables

The core of ada.eco is built around three interconnected technical pillars that together enable identity-led collaboration, local activation, and global visibility.

2.1 Digital Identity and Matching Platform

ada.eco is built on a “local-first” framework that connects people with learning and contribution opportunities aligned with their interests and location. Over time, participants connect to the broader ecosystem via Self-Sovereign On-chain Identity (SSOI) as enabling infrastructure.

Deliverables:

• Public ada.eco web app with entry points to:
  • Projects (Contribution Opportunities)
  • Learning opportunities
  • Income generation opportunities
  • Cardano onboarding
  • Governance pathways
• AI-Driven Matching UX to support:
  • Mentorship discovery
  • Skills-based and interest-based matching
  • Contribution and income generation opportunity surfacing

2.2 Community spaces

ada.eco supports a distributed network of Smarthubs — industry specific or thematic spaces that function as hands-on onboarding, learning, and governance nodes.

Deliverables:

• Facilitation guides and event playbooks
• Discoverability engine to surface “local” events, geographically, industry specific or thematic

2.3 Annual Global Event Infrastructure (ada.day)

A key milestone is the launch of a global Cardano Community Celebration event: ada.day — a 24-hour multi-timezone showcase of ecosystem value and its preceeding activation event to bring new users into the ecosystem alongside and cooperation with the organisers of the global Ada Lovelace Day.

Deliverables:

• Event coordination system and tooling for decentralized execution
• Co-branding kits and templates for organizers
• Global activation framework for synchronizing content, visibility, and onboarding

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3.0 Technical Components

3.1 Digital Identity Framework

Implementation based on Andamio's Self-Sovereign On-chain Identity (SSOI) with emphasis on enhancing discoverability and facilitating community membership while still providing verifiable credentials and user-controlled identity management

3.2 Matching System Integration

Integration with woman-owned OneUpOneDown's established matching technology deployed in women’s networks globally to enhance discoverability and provide sophisticated match-making between users, opportunities, projects, and mentorships based on interests, skills, and location

3.3 Geographic/Skill Mapping Visualization

Interactive visualization tools that map community spaces, talent pools, project distribution, and emerging solution patterns to help users navigate the ecosystem and identify convergent approaches to complex challenges

Development of an interactive map layer showing:

• People
• Projects
• Interests
• Activities
• Emerging patterns and gaps across the network

3.4 Smarthub Toolkit

Provision of modular technical templates for local spaces, and Smarthub deployment including digital tools for education, governance participation, and business development that enable communities to address their unique challenges while contributing to collective intelligence

3.5 Accessible Wallet Tools

Experimentation with Game Changer Wallet for multi-sig solutions and Social Account Wallet Creation, powered by Mesh, to provide secure, user-friendly onboarding and financial tools with reduced technical barriers

3.6 Education Platform Integration

Implementation of Andamio Protocol and Andamio SDK to create the custom ada.eco app, providing structured education pathways and seamless integration with the broader learning ecosystem

3.7 ada.day Event Infrastructure

24-hour, decentralized, multi-format event tooling that integrates virtual and in-person participation.

3.8 Data Analytics Dashboard

Development of dashboards to track adoption, participation, and growth metrics across the ecosystem.

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4.0 Additional Layers: Content & Events

4.1 Content Layer – Shared Storytelling + Visual Identity

This layer amplifies Cardano’s purpose through reusable narrative infrastructure and real-world stories from the edges.

Deliverables:

• Messaging architecture aligned to Cardano values
• Visual identity system and co-branded asset templates
• “Narrative Playbook” with storytelling formats and use cases
• A minimum of 10 published founder features, thematic explainers, and/or region-focused stories
• Modular onboarding and values-aligned content for key demographics (e.g. women, newcomers)

4.2 Events Layer – Community Activation + Global Calendar

In addition to Ada Lovelace Day activation and Cardano’s inaugural annual ada.day, the Events Layer strengthens ongoing community coordination and local activation.

Deliverables:

• Public-facing ecosystem calendar and event discovery tool
• Smarthub-ready event kits with materials, templates, and toolkits
• Global ada.day pilot across 6+ time zones with digital and physical components
• Event coordination resources for community-led and regionally themed community spaces

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5.0 Implementation Approach

5.1 Beyond Traditional Technology Development

The ada.eco technical roadmap represents not just a sequence of software releases, but an evolution toward a new kind of social infrastructure. Each phase builds toward a system that enables communities to address complex, interconnected challenges through coordinated action.

5.2 Technical Delivery

• OneUpOneDown: Matching system integration
• Andamio: Self-Sovereign On-chain Identity (SSOI), learning, and governance SDKs
• Gimbalabs: Implementation partner for frontend/backend build

5.2 Hackathon Development Model

A key component of the implementation strategy is hosting hackathons focused on building ada.eco on top of Andamio to:

• Apply designs provided by Jo and the ada.eco team
• Be jointly planned and facilitated by Nadia and James, with James representing both Andamio and Gimbalabs
• Convene collaborative implementation of matching, governance, and onboarding features
• Leverage developers provided by Gimbalabs to implement the technical components
• Serve as a collaborative environment for integrating all technical aspects of the platform

5.3. Phase-Based Implementation

The roadmap unfolds through three distinct phases, each building greater capacity for collective sense-making and action.

5.3.1. Foundation Phase (Q2 2025)

• Establishment of core identity and connection infrastructure
• Initial integration of OneUpOneDown matching capabilities
• Development of visualization prototypes that reveal patterns of collaboration
• Creation of the basic ada.eco application using Andamio SDK

5.3.2. Smarthub Activation Phase (Q3 2025)

• Deployment of the first community spaces as living laboratories
• Implementation of Smarthub connection, communication and knowledge sharing tools
• Development of collective intelligence features to identify emergent use-cases
• Expansion of the matching system to connect complementary community initiatives

5.3.3. Network Emergence Phase (Q4 2025)

• Activation event at Ada Lovelace Day
• Launch of ada.day as a global community celebration and sense-making event
• Deployment of tools that make local action globally visible
• Development of metrics that measure system-level impacts
• Creation of feedback loops that accelerate collective learning
• Publish a public-facing “Pattern Library of Participation” — a living collection of use cases, signals, and system adaptations observed during the build, to support others in learning from Cardano’s coordination model.

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6.0 Designing for Emergence

Rather than defining all features upfront, ada.eco is built as an evolving system that supports community-led development.

Features will be defined by early participants themselves, with the ada.eco system specifically designed to facilitate this emergent development.

Architecture of the infrastructure is designed for modular growth, enabling communities to propose, test, and build what they need. In so doing the process recognises that addressing complex systemic challenges requires this approach where the tools evolve due to the collective intelligence and context of their users.

This participatory design and development model ensures:

• Responsiveness to user feedback and needs
• Adaptability to use cases and demographics
• A durable foundation for future ecosystem-wide innovation

• Total Project Costs: 560,975
• Total Direct Event Costs: 259,962
• Total Team Costs: 941,600
• Total Overhead Costs: 142,111

TOTAL: 1,904,649

Full details: https://clik.vc/adaeco

Team Size: see Budget Worksheet for full overview of teams and scope.

• Core Team: 10-12 members (Product Lead, Technical Lead, Project Management, Brand Development, Technical Implementation, Community Engagement, Education Design)
• Extended Contributors: 15-20 part-time contributors (Smart hub Facilitators, Content Creators, Technical Specialists)
• Community Team: 30+ local advocates across 6 timezones.

Duration:

• Phase 1 (Foundation): Q2 2025 (3 months)
• Phase 2 (Smarthub & Identity Deployment): Q3 2025 (3 months)
• Phase 3 (ada.day Launch): Q4 2025 (3 months)
• Total Project Duration: 12 months to build, launch and commence delivery

Full details of team size, duration, timeline: https://clik.vc/adaeco

Jo Allum is a builder of platforms, beginning with launch of award-winning magazines in UK, Australia and Aotearoa, then Creative Director of a 36-title portfolio for Murdoch’s Pacific Publications. As Founder and Director of http://VentureCentre.io she delivered a platform which supported growth of Aotearoa’s national network of angel investors from 70 to over 800, and a hyperlocal network of venture support from zero to 8000 in 3 years with a vibrant self-sustaining co-working space and a charitable entity for high-school entrepreneurs at its core. Now as a venture catalyst and ecosystem cultivator operating at the intersection of Aotearoa locally and Cardano globally she has onboarded and/or networked together indigenous, identity, government, education and capital allocation infrastructure ventures and contributes to governance as a member of the Eastern Cardano Council which holds a community seat on the Constitutional Committee.

Nadia Hopkins is a capacity builder who loves strategic design, community engagement and constructing learning frameworks. She is Co-Founder of Cryptofluency and produces the Cryptofluency media, materials and content. She was the Catalyst Circle V3 Representative in 2022 and has completed two funded Catalyst proposals from Fund 8 with an active Fund 13 proposal underway. She served as the elected Constitutional Delegate from Philadelphia at the Cardano Constitution Convention in Argentina and continues to contribute to the Governance Workstreams Consortium.

James Dunseith is a teacher, developer and community facilitator. He is a co-founder of Andamio, a co-founder at Gimbalabs, and a pioneering participant in Project Catalyst. Projects across the ecosystem are lead by people who started learning Cardano development at Gimbalabs. James is a regular facilitator of community meetings and live-coding sessions, and has put all the non-technical stuff he has learned as a Cardano community member into the designs of Andamio.

Dzhuliana Nikolova is the Co-Founder and CTO at OneUpOneDown.org. She has a storied history participating in and contributing to the Cardano ecosystem, including multiple funded Catalyst proposals and a leading role in Catalyst Women. Education, technology, and self-learning are her passion and focus. Her work includes 10+ years experience in UX/UI design & product development, 8+ years experience in software development, 8+ years experience in self-development, education and mentoring.

Natalie Robinson is a founder and strategic marketer with a passion for launching and scaling startups. She is the Co-Founder & CEO at OneUpOneDown.org, facilitating near-peer mentor matches for women in business and tech and embedding mentorship as a common practice. OneUpOneDown delivers high-impact mentorship for thousands of women from over 120 countries. Its mentorship infrastructure that enables communities and organisations to unlock the potential within their networks.

Every member of this founding team is a Cardano OG. Each in their own way explores the same fundamental question: What becomes possible when human coordination transcends traditional limitations, relational social-technologies are centred and essential systems remain resilient against shutdown or capture by self-interest? Our work envisions and builds toward this robust, collaborative future.

The initiative will be maintained and supported through multiple sustainability mechanisms:

1. Revenue Streams:

   • Community smart hub membership fees for premium services
   • Lead generation commissions from project matches
   • Ada.day event sponsorships and participation fees
   • Education program revenue share

2. Decentralized Governance:

   • A community-led steering committee will oversee ongoing development
   • Transparent reporting on KPIs and financial performance
   • Regular community feedback cycles to refine offerings

3. Future Development:

   • As the initiative matures, ada.eco may transition into a DAO structure
   • Community stewardship will ensure long-term sustainability
   • Development of a tokenomics model to align incentives

4. Community Ownership:

   • Brand and infrastructure assets will be owned by the Cardano community
   • Open-source tools and templates will enable ongoing contributions
   • Knowledge sharing and documentation will support replication

The ada.eco initiative builds upon community-led successes and collaborations:

1. Cardano Governance & Catalyst Fund: Our team members have been active participants in these long-standing initiatives, where the need for coordinated engagement in governance was repeatedly identified as a priority.

2. Constitutional Committee Community Work: The Constitutional Committee's participatory approach demonstrated the power of community-led initiatives to deliver results through consensus in a complex project which ada.eco extends into the research, development and marketing domains.

3. Women in Blockchain Summit Series: Community events focused on women's participation have consistently highlighted the need for more inclusive onboarding strategies, validating our approach.

4. Diverse Stakeholder Support: Our initiative has garnered preliminary support from DReps, SPOs, project leaders, and community organizers who recognize the need for a coordinated marketing and adoption strategy.

5. Feedback from Community engagements: The proposal reflects and responds to the issues raised directly in the DRep and community governance sessions — particularly the calls for:

• Infrastructure that bridges the human and technical layers
• Better coordination across funded projects
• Tools for understanding what works and where impact is emerging
• Alternatives to generic, top-down marketing that disrespects local insight

Summary and supporters: https://clik.vc/collabadaeco

The proposal has the following key dependencies:

Technical Integrations — the proposal interweaves the technologies and capabilities of multiple established teams who will collaborate to deliver a unified platform.

1. Matching & Mapping System: Established collaboration with OneUpOneDown to build community mapping tooling.

2. Education Platform: Established relationship with Andamio Learning Management System for structured education pathways and an ecology of knowledge.

3. Identity Solutions: collaboration with identity providers within the Cardano ecosystem as entry and connection points to meet industry or community needs.

4. Community Smart hub Locations: Securing physical space partnerships in target locations across 6 timezones for initial community smart hubs deployment.

5. Ada Lovelace Day and Ada.day Event Planning: Coordination with the existing Ada Lovelace Day team to activate new users and then the broader Cardano ecosystem to wrap them into participation in Cardano’s flagship annual event.

6. DRep and SPO Participation: Engagement from governance representatives and stake pool operators to promote their contributions to the ecosystem.