Since its inception, Intersect has played a critical role in Cardano's decentralized transition, including:

• Stewarding the Chang and Plomin upgrades Facilitating Cardano’s first Constitution
• Managing the 2025 roadmap and budget cycle Supporting SPOs, DRePs, and CC participants
• Organizing global workshops, hubs, and governance events
• Maintaining the Cardano core Haskell codebases through its Open Source Office

Intersect will now not seek retrospective funding for our 2025 work to date. This request covers June 2025 to June 2026.

Request: ₳15.75m allocation ($7.875M USD equivalent)

• Amount is an allocation, funding is based on USD and to be disbursed quarterly based on exchange rate
• $500K earmarked for elected committee member stipends
• Any surplus will be swept back into the Treasury

Intersect 2025–2026 Treasury Proposal

Problem Statement

As Cardano enters the age of Voltaire, governance is transitioning from a small number of founding organizations to a decentralized global community. While the introduction of a constitution and on-chain voting forms the structural backbone, these mechanisms alone are not enough to sustain a functional decentralized system. What’s needed in parallel is community-aligned coordination - infrastructure that enables participation, promotes continuity, and supports informed decision-making across the network.

At present, Intersect is the only named Administrator, a role outlined in Cardano’s Constitution and connected to over 100 live proposals in the current budget cycle. Given the nascent stages of Cardano’s governance journey, this makes Intersect a critical component of governance execution — providing oversight, legal and operational accountability, and administrative support for proposal disbursement and monitoring.

Intersect is also responsible for the stewardship of Cardano’s core Haskell codebases, including the repositories that power the Cardano node. This role involves more than maintenance — it includes coordinating new releases, aligning contributors around engineering best practices, and ensuring that upgrades are ready for safe deployment. Intersect acts as a neutral facilitator in this process, helping translate new feature proposals from ecosystem vendors into stable, tested releases that can be confidently adopted across the network.

Intersect has played a central role in coordinating ecosystem-wide upgrades, including the successful deployment of the Chang and Plomin hard forks. These upgrades required aligning infrastructure providers, SPOs, dApps, and exchanges globally — a process demanding deep technical coordination, ecosystem trust, and communications capacity.

Beyond technical infrastructure, Intersect provides a collaborative space for governance to mature and grow, supporting over 30 working groups and eight elected committees made up of Cardano community members. These committees focus on key areas such as budgeting, product development, open source, membership, growth, and technical standards — offering non-binding recommendations and practical insight to on-chain actors like DReps and SPOs.

Without effective coordination, upgrades can become slower to deploy, Treasury processes harder to navigate, and community participation more fragmented. Intersect was created to help reduce these friction points - not to control them, but to support a smoother decentralized experience through transparency, pragmatism, and member-led infrastructure. While we still have room to grow, our purpose remains clear: to serve the ecosystem as a reliable enabler of Cardano’s decentralized future.

This proposal enables Intersect to continue providing essential infrastructure, coordination, and governance support for Cardano during a pivotal 12-month period from June 2025 to June 2026.

Intersect exists to serve as a neutral, nonprofit coordination layer that bridges decentralized governance and decentralized infrastructure. Our mission is not to direct the network, but to enable it. By stewarding core systems, supporting community-led processes, and facilitating safe, transparent delivery.

Specifically, this proposal will fund Intersect to:

1. Steward core infrastructure

• Maintain and govern the open-source Cardano node repositories, including the Haskell codebases
• Coordinate and release upgrades proposed by ecosystem contributors, ensuring safe deployment, roadmap alignment, and stakeholder readiness
• Provide stability and continuity across key engineering practices and upgrade cycles

2. Execute the Administrator role

• Continue fulfilling the responsibilities of the “Administrator” role defined in the Constitution. Intersect is currently listed as an Administrator on over 100 budget proposals currently
• Provide contract and oversight support, including proposal vetting, operational execution, smart contract development, and compliance monitoring
• Act as a reliable counterparty for Treasury-funded initiatives, offering arbitration routes while supporting increased transparency and decentralization

3. Support participation and coordination

• Deliver stipends to elected committee members — beginning formal recognition of their time and expertise and
• Facilitate an election process to confirm a new Constitutional Committee
• Provide professional operational and coordination support to 8 committees and 30+ working groups
• Provide through our members, onboarding, tools, and resources for DReps, SPOs, and the Constitutional Committee

4. Facilitate roadmap and budget processes

• Via the Product Committee, facilitating product roadmap development and long-term ecosystem vision
• Rebuilding a budget process for 2026 and coordinating the delivery and on-chain submission of a 2026 budget
• Conceptualize and being to operationalize a scalable RFP process for committee-aligned budget proposals (example the Open Source Committee proposal)

5. Expand Ecosystem Capacity

• Support the emergence of new MBOs, associations, and working groups
• Recognize and reinforce the need for multiple Administrators in the future to support a plural and scalable governance model

Intersect’s nonprofit status provides the right structure for these activities and we commit that any unused funds will be returned to the Treasury, and the requested ₳15.75m is a capped allocation, not a guaranteed disbursement. Funds will be released quarterly, pegged to live ADA/USD exchange rates, and tracked through transparent public reporting.

This proposal reflects the direction Intersect is now committed to: clearer scope, radical accountability, and coordination that serves — not controls — Cardano’s governance and development.

Always-on initiatives

• Administrator role for community-approved budget items where Intersect is stated as Administrator.
• Facilitate ecosystem readiness with core Cardano node releases and upgrades
• Professional member support services, providing administrative support across our elected committees.

In addition to our “business-as-usual” workstreams above, key milestones are identified below. We recognize that Cardano and the blockchain develops and innovates at a pace unlike other industries. As a result, we expect to add considerably to our outputs throughout the year.

Q3 2025

• Start of the Paid Open Source Model
• Launch Open Source Fellowship Program
• Launch retrospective of budget process
• Cardano Product Roadmap proposal for 2026
• CC elections facilitated, with a new CC confirmed on-chain
• Intersect governance and finance report
• Global governance and roadmap workshops, including participation at RareEvo

Q4 2025

• Launch fresh budget process for 2026
• Finalize and submit 2026 Budget on-chain, including the submission of 2026 Net-Change-Limit
• Intersect Committee and Board elections
• 2025 Annual Member Meeting held
• Participate in key ecosystem events such as the Cardano Summit (pending DRep approval)
• End of year Intersect governance report

Q1 2026

• Launch new 2026 roadmap delivery coordination
• Intersect 2025 full financial report
• Publish 2025 financial and operational retrospective

Q2 2026

• Intersect governance and finance report
• Member renewal and onboarding campaign

ADA allocation: ₳15.75m

• Fixed USD value: $7,875,000
• Intersect operations: $6,925,000
• Cardano Development Holdings: $950,000
• Disbursement schedule: Quarterly, pegged to live exchange rates

Important note: This budget request is an allocation, not a guaranteed expenditure.

More on strategic changes as of Apr 25, 2025:

Under Intersect’s new direction, we are prioritizing lean operations and financial discipline. As a not-for-profit organization, Intersect is committed to using Treasury funds responsibly and efficiently. Resources will only be drawn down when necessary, and certain budgeted components such as legal costs related to contract arbitration may not be utilized at all. Our budget request will now not seek retrospective funding, providing a necessary clean slate. This proposal seeks funding from June 25’ to June 26’.

In the short to mid-term, we are also implementing a full scale transition plan to reduce our reliance on external consultants by hiring experienced and talented contributors from within the Cardano community - reinforcing our commitment to member-led delivery and ecosystem sustainability. Our team costs in 2024 amounted to $5.33 million. Acknowledging the need for additional capacity in our Administrator role, and in light of the cost savings described above and detailed further down, we are working towards a leaner operation.

Payments will be disbursed quarterly based on live ADA/USD exchange rates to reflect real-time value, likely resulting in less ada being distributed over the course of our 12-month funding ask. Any unspent funds at the end of the budget cycle will be returned to the Treasury.

Breakdown

Intersect Core – $6.925m

$4.875m Personnel

• People: $4,500,000 at an average FTE $100,000, inclusive of related expenses, applicable taxes, and benefits
• Board of Directors Compensation: $175,000 at $35,000 per Director
• Company expenses: $200,000

Other core costs

• Software Licenses & Infrastructure: $500,000
• Legal & Compliance: $500,000
• Board Services: $250,000
• Membership & Marketing: $300,000
• Committee Stipends: $500,000

Cardano Development Holdings – $950,000

• Member Services including availability of Governance Action deposits: $250,000
• Legal & Insurance relating to Administrator role: $500,000
• Financial Custodianship: $100,000
• Analytics & Reporting Tools: $100,000

Based on our 2024 financial report, our current headcount is distributed across the following functional areas. This distribution remains agile and will evolve in response to executive decisions and strategic priorities over the coming weeks:

• Ecosystem and Governance: 15.9%
• Open Source: 4.5%
• Operational Services: 20.5%
• Product Curation: 13.6%
• Membership Services (including tooling and web): 31.9%
• Technical Operations: 13.6%

Intersect relies on a combination of member participation, elected committees, and dedicated staff. This proposal continues to provide professional support services to fund the operations of:

Committees:

• Product Committee (7 members, 15 SMEs)
• Budget Committee (9 members)
• Civics Committee (9 members)
• Open Source Committee (9 members)
• Technical Steering Committee (9 members)
• Membership & Community Committee (10 members)
• Growth & Marketing Committee (8 members)
• Intersect Steering Committee (4 members + 8 committee chairs)

The team at Intersect represents a broad mix of experience and domain expertise, spanning open source, governance, infrastructure, fintech, and decentralized systems. Many of our team members are long-standing contributors to Cardano and are deeply embedded in the ecosystem - both professionally and as community participants.

Jack Briggs - Interim Executive Director

As of April 25, 2025, Jack now leads Intersect as our Interim Executive Director and will be reaffirming Intersect’s mission and core purpose — bringing Intersect back to serve the community as a lean, accountable, and principled enabler of open collaboration, where decisions are transparent, power is distributed, and progress is driven by those who build and contribute.

Jack brings over a decade of experience leading large teams for global organizations such as Vodafone and Three Mobile, as well as multiple technology startups, including those focused on open source. Outside of technology, he was twice elected Chairman of a large residents' association representing over 150 households, and in 2018, he stood as a candidate in the UK local elections for a national party.

Passionate about blockchain, Jack started with Bitcoin in 2012, Ethereum in 2017, and Cardano in 2019. From 2021, he was one of the earliest contributors to Cardano's governance design, including collaborating on the first version of CIP-1694.

Nick Cook - Interim Director of Operations

Nick is an experienced, driven and energetic leader with a proven history of working in the Web3, blockchain, fintech and AI space. Nick has played a critical part in establishing community hubs for Intersect, linking the company with the wider Cardano community. His work has been invaluable for engaging members with our broader mission.

The Board of Directors are now working on an open recruitment strategy with members at the forefront in confirming a permanent Executive Director.

Intersect is committed to long-term sustainability beyond the initial funding period. As a very accessible member-based organization, we are deliberately structured to keep barriers to entry low welcoming contributors from across the Cardano ecosystem, regardless of their size or formal affiliation. This inclusive approach allows us to coordinate work across a wide network of individual contributors and community-driven initiatives, but it also means we cannot rely solely on high membership dues or private funding models, as some traditional open source foundations do.

Given our coordinating role and public mandate, Treasury funding remains the most viable option currently available to support Intersect’s essential infrastructure, governance, and support services. However, we also recognize the importance of reducing long-term reliance on the Treasury where possible.

Looking ahead, we aspire to diversify our revenue over time in ways that are consistent with our values - through partnerships, value-aligned services, and expanded membership contributions. While Treasury support may remain a key part of Intersect’s model, our aim is to strengthen sustainability and resilience so we can continue serving the Cardano community well into the future.

Intersect currently supports:

• 1,900 members and 2,800 associates across 74 countries
• 6 regional hubs (LATAM, Japan, Sri Lanka, Europe, Africa, USA)
• 30+ working groups and 8 elected committees

Intersect is also the listed administrator on over 100 community proposals submitted through the budget cycle.

• Continued participation by DRePs, SPOs, and members

• Active collaboration with elected committees and hubs