This proposal is to fund the maintenance and evolution of the only fully open-source community-owned tool to support participation in Cardano’s governance.

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Govtool is currently made of 5 pillars managed by 5 community builders (as well as other smaller individual contributors):

• Voting Pillar / ByronNetwork

• Delegation Pillar / ByronNetwork

• Proposal and Budget Discussions Pillar / WeDeliver

• Outcomes Pillar / LidoNation

• Constitution and Constitutional Committee portal / Bloxico

To support these pillars, there is an overall QA function and DevOps function

• QA / DQuadrant

• DevOps / unassigned (currently supported by Intersect DevOps)

• User support / unassigned (currently supported by Intersect staff)

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These builders are directly contracted by the Cardano community via an open and transparent grant process via the Governance Tools Working Group (supported by Intersect staff). They get direction from the Governance Tools Working Group (an open group accessible to all Cardano community members) and via direct feedback from users via the open backlog in GitHub. This process has two facilitators, one focused on product management and delivery, and one on user experience, ensuring alignment, cohesiveness, and action.

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The long-term vision for Governance tools and the 2025 roadmap has been defined by the community through open feedback and consultation via the Governance Tools Working group.

With Cardano’s age of Voltaire, Cardano now has an on-chain government. For on-chain governance to be effective, it requires participation. To facilitate participation, a simple and consolidated user experience is key to allow ada holders to get informed and onboarded, delegate to DReps (or become DReps), see and vote on governance actions, discuss and create new governance actions, and see outcomes of the whole process (and more).

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It is also key for the Cardano community to own and maintain a common set of basic tools that will always be open, non-comercialized and available to foster this participation and so to keep decision making in Cardano ecosystem matters as fair, transparent and open as possible.

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Without a non-commercialized solution, we risk turning participation into a product. If the core governance tools are driven by profit, access and influence could become uneven and shaped by whoever can afford to maintain or fund their development. That undermines the whole point of decentralized governance. A baseline, community owned, open alternative must always exist, something reliable, transparent, and neutral and the one that ensures every ada holder has equal opportunity to participate.

Cardano GovTool, is a set of open-source, community-owned governance tools, has been providing this support for open participation since before CIP-1694 was approved.

• It first fostered adoption of wallet upgrading to the new governance standards (CIP-95/CIP-105) with its first beta version

• It fostered testing and usage of SanchoNet, with the SanchoNet Govtool (used by over 30k+ unique users), which helped iteration to get to the bootstrapping phase of Cardano’s governance

• Since the Chang upgrade, it opened participation during the bootstrapping phase of Governance, helping grow the DRep pool and the total ada delegated to DReps, as well as making governance clear and visible to the community, also allowing the first-ever community-led hardfork to be decided transparently on-chain

• Since the Plomin upgrade, it has been the key benchmark reference for Cardano Governance for the community, being at the forefront in solving new hard challenges, creating reference implementations, and setting standards, allowing other community tools to provide extended value via their interfaces.

Cardano Govtool has been and remains the only fully open-source, fully community-owned set of tools to support the governing of Cardano without a commercial agenda. Via community feedback and direct decision making via the open Governance Tools working group, it keeps evolving and improving, incubates opportunities to for the whole ecosystem to participate and/or build on top of it.

A set of truly community-owned tools to participate in the Government of our ecosystem, such as Cardano Govtool, is a critical and pivotal component of Cardano, ensuring that regardless of individual tools' decisions and support, Cardano’s governance will always be transparent and easy to access, encouraging fair and distributed governance.

The funds requested in this proposal will be used:

• To keep the current 5 pillars always up and running (5 applications: Voting Pillar, Delegation Pillar, Proposal and Budget discussion Pillar, Outcomes Pillar, and Constitutional Committee portal)

• Adding new and improved features driven directly by community participation and needs, and supporting integration and creation of better standards for all other governance tools in the ecosystem. Based on the high-level roadmap defined by the community via the Governance Tools Working Group, which includes, but is not limited to:

  • Expansion of the outcomes pillars to show transparently the full governance process, from early discussions, through voting, and to outcomes (either enacted decisions or rejected actions)

  • Improvement of the integration of the Constitutional Committee's votes and rationale

  • Expansion of DRep history (including voting history) to make it easier to leverage liquid democracy by selecting and updating delegation, as well as DRep favouring

  • Support to create group DReps

  • Support to have group proposers discuss proposals and submit on-chain actions, lowering the barriers to submitting governance actions

  • Adding moderation to the proposal discussion pillar

  • Adding pre-governance polling to support in a transparent and decentralized manner the social processes that happen before governance actions are submitted (this includes, for example, the CC elections and the budget proposals)

  • Improve code documentation to expand the pool of individual contributors, helping reduce the costs of development and maintenance, and creating rewarding opportunities for everyone in the Cardano community, as well as simplifying the leveraging of open source code to create new governance applications that improve and refine further the experience

  • Expand further open APIs to allow many individual builders in Cardano to create tools to participate in governance

  • Expand support to make it easy to discuss and submit all types of governance actions

  • Funding support staff to stay responsive as user engagement increases across all channels.

In short Cardano Govtool is like a public square where the Cardano community joins effort in defining and improving their experience for a simpler, more open and transparent government, where hard challenges get solved with the shared expertise of our ecosystem and where consolidated effort enables smaller individual contributors to multiply the value provided to the whole community.

Some key items already delivered in 2025 and in the roadmap include:

Already delivered in 2025:

• Supporting discussion and submission of New Constitution and No Confidence governance actions

• Supporting ada handle resolution

• Support for DRep images

• Support for CIP-129 DRep IDs

• Support for metadata hosted on IPFS

• Support for searching by DRep metadata

• Support for PreProd network

• Support for local specific denomination of figures

• Support for mathematical styling within governance action metadata

• Support for displaying constitutional committee ratification thresholds and not voted totals

• Support for redirecting users to outcomes pillar from expired governance action links

• Launch of outcomes pillar

• Improved performance of DRep directory and Live voting

Planned:

• Expansion of the outcomes pillars to show transparently the full governance process, from early discussions, through voting, and to outcomes (either enacted decisions or rejected actions)

• Improvement of the integration of the Constitutional Committee's votes and rationale

• Expansion of DRep history (including voting history) to make it easier to leverage liquid democracy by selecting and updating delegation, as well as DRep favouring

• Support to create group DReps, allowing a better distribution of power

• Support to have group proposers discuss proposals and submit on-chain actions, lowering the barriers to submitting governance actions

• Adding moderation to the proposal discussion pillar

• Adding pre-governance polling to support in a transparent and decentralized manner the social processes that happen before governance actions are submitted (this includes, for example, the CC elections and the budget proposals)

• Improve code documentation to expand the pool of individual contributors, helping reduce the costs of development and maintenance, and creating rewarding opportunities for everyone in the Cardano community, as well as simplifying the leveraging of open source code to create new governance applications that improve and refine further the experience

• Expand further open APIs to allow many individual builders in Cardano to create tools to participate in governance

• Expand support to make it easy to discuss and submit all types of governance actions

The funds requested cover 12 months of maintenance and improvement for 5 applications that make up GovTool. Because GovTool remains community-owned, funds will continue to be allocated via an open and transparent grant process, and also the iterations of the different applications that make up GovTool will be subject to pivoting, steering directly by the Cardano Community feedback and needs.

The working group has budgeted based on an assumed ada price and a planned set of features. The commitment is to be efficient with funding, so any budget remaining at the end of the 12 months will be returned to the Cardano Treasury.

The budget cost breakdown is as follows:

• P1 - Add support for more roles: This will expand the participation in governance > $50,000 to be distributed to community builders

  • Add support for moderators: it will reduce spam and bad actors, supporting a better environment for more participation

  • Add support for group/scripts (DReps, Proposers ...): It will make it easier for people to co-create and submit GAs as well as become group DReps. This will balance the distribution of power

• P2 - Expand open contribution: This will strengthen the governance tools further, ensuring they remain community-owned and maintained, so ensuring Cardano governance will always have an easy path for participation> $20,000 to be distributed to community builders

  • Increase the number of contributors to the governance tools project (with different expertise) via grants and bounties: This ensures these applications remain owned and maintained by the community

  • Continued support for open APIs: This opens new possibilities for other tools to use these applications

  • Expand processes to integrate/connect other tools: This opens new possibilities for other tools to use these applications

• P2 - Review user needs through user research to refine experience: This will attract other experts to contribute to these tools and it will give actionable insights to make it even easier to participate> $10,000 to be distributed to community builders

  • Create a continuous improvement plan via structured user research: This provides a rigorous process to collect and document insights, which then inform precise improvements. This approach also allows for allocating funds more efficiently

• P1 - Expand and refine tools to better support full governance: As we enter full governance, we will see an increase in participation (also driven by the tools themselves). For this, we need to make sure the existing MVP tools are scalable and are able to keep governance accessible to everyone> $30,000 to be distributed to community builders

  • Improve scalability of the whole system to work even more as one: This will increase usability and so participation

  • Add open-source Analytics: This supports transparency

  • Full mobile support: This will increase usability and so participation

  • Add open guides, in-app onboarding to governance, and its tools: This will increase usability and so participation

  • Render all GA types: This will increase usability and so participation

  • Voting thresholds and metrics for GAs: This will increase usability and so participation

• P0 - Core governance tools maintenance: This ensures the governance tools are always operational, giving the Cardano community a safe and reliable option to fully participate. The model allows for distributing the work to different maintainers with precise responsibilities, and it allows to open regularly the maintainers' contracts for tender

  • Voting application - rendered as pillar of GovTool experience > $180,000
    This covers the costs of software engineers, QA engineers, and DevOps support for the environments related to this application. This application connects directly to the chain, requiring engineers with more niche skills. They are responsible for maintaining the application, making sure it's always operational, and need to support as well as external contributors (specific criteria are described in the existing contracts)

  • Delegation application - rendered as pillar of GovTool experience > $180,000
    This covers the costs of software engineers, QA engineers, and DevOps support for the environments related to this application. This application connects directly to the chain, requiring engineers with more niche skills. They are responsible for maintaining the application, making sure it's always operational, and need to support as well as external contributors (specific criteria are described in the existing contracts)

  • Proposal discussion application - rendered as pillar of GovTool experience > $120,000
    This covers the costs of software engineers, QA engineers, and DevOps support for the environments related to this application. They are responsible for maintaining the application, making sure it's always operational, and need to support as well as external contributors (specific criteria are described in the existing contracts)

  • Governance Actions outcomes application - rendered as a pillar of the GovTool experience > $70,000
    This covers the costs of software engineers, QA engineers, and DevOps support for the environments related to this application. They are responsible for maintaining the application, making sure it's always operational, and need to support as well as external contributors (specific criteria are described in the existing contracts)

  • Constitutional Committee Portal > $100,000
    This covers the costs of software engineers, QA engineers, and DevOps support for the environments related to this application. They are responsible for maintaining the application, making sure it's always operational, and need to support as well as external contributors (specific criteria are described in the existing contracts)

  • Overall E2E testing > $180,000
    This covers the cost for end-to-end testing of the 4 applications that make up the Govtool experience, and also the Constitutional Committee portal

  • Overall DevOps > $100,000
    This covers the costs related to environments and DevOps engineers to manage the environments and deployments of the 4 govtool applications and the Constitutional Committee portal

  • Process coordinator #1 > $80,000
    It ensures all the suppliers have a clear daily and joint direction, as well as ensuring they align their deliverables to the community-defined goals

  • Process coordinator #2 > $80,000
    It ensures the overall experience remains cohesive, supporting participation and managing the design system organization

• 10% contingency (accounting also for ada fluctuation): This covers any potential unknown (issue or drastic governance change or need that will come up), and it partially protects for ada fluctuation> $120,000

Each pillar has a maintainer who was assigned via an open and transparent grant process. The size of the teams is managed by the maintainer to make sure optimal delivery is achieved; however, in general teams are composed as follows:

• Voting application - rendered as pillar of GovTool experience

  • 2x software engineers (This application connects directly to the chain, requiring engineers with more niche skills)

  • 0.25x QA engineers

  • 0.25 x DevOps support for the environments related to this application

  • Shared support of Govtool wrapper which includes all the shared components

• Delegation application - rendered as pillar of GovTool experience

  • 1x software engineer (This application connects directly to the chain, requiring engineers with more niche skills)

  • 0.25 x QA engineers and DevOps support for the environments related to this application.

  • Shared support of Govtool wrapper which includes all the shared components

• Proposal discussion application - rendered as pillar of GovTool experience

  • 1.5 x software engineers

  • 0.25 x QA engineers

  • 0.25 x DevOps support for the environments related to this application.

  • Shared support of Govtool wrapper which includes all the shared components

• Outcomes application - rendered as pillar of GovTool experience

  • 2x software engineers (This application connects directly to the chain, requiring engineers with more niche skills)

  • 0.25x QA engineers

  • 0.25 x DevOps support for the environments related to this application

  • Shared support of Govtool wrapper which includes all the shared components

• Constitutional Committee Portal

  • 2x software engineers (This application connects directly to the chain, requiring engineers with more niche skills)

  • 0.25x QA engineers

  • 0.25 x DevOps support for the environments related to this application

• Overall E2E testing

  • 2x QA engineers

• Overall DevOps

  • 2x DevOps

• Process coordinator #1> They ensure all the maintainers have a clear daily and joint direction as well as ensuring they align their deliverables to the community-defined goals

• Process coordinator #2> They ensure the overall experience remains cohesive, supporting participation and managing the design system org

The Cardano Govtool has been the benchmark governance tool since the emergence of on-chain governance, the builders currently working on it have defined from scratch technical and user experience standards currently used by other governance tools. The process is facilitated with the support of IntersectMBO, its committees, and working groups.

Furthermore, the current maintainers are well known in the Cardano ecosystem for their reliability.

https://dquadrant.com/

https://binarapps.com/

https://we-deliver.io/

https://www.lidonation.com/en

https://bloxico.com/

Cardano Govtool has already passed the hardest part, its first implementation (creating standards and processes from scratch), and it’s now running with a decentralised open source model with multiple maintainers who keep the whole experience up and running as well as adding and improving existing features.

The Cardano community has been using and taking value from the applications that make up Cardano Govtool since before CIP-1694 was approved.

• Over 30k unique users have used, tested, and provided feedback over the beta testing in SanchoNet Govtool, which created a path to full governance.

• Hundreds of ideas and feedback have been submitted via the open backlog stored in GitHub, showing participation in the evolution of the tool and ownership of it by the Cardano community.

• The governance tools working group, which as of now has met more than 65 times, has become the focal point and trusted source of info for multiple builders in the governance space, which connect weekly to provide feedback and direction to Govtool and align on common standards.

• Since full governance came live with Plomin upgrade in September 2024, the Cardano Govtool has had over 48k+ visits, over 76k+ page views in 170 countries (with the highest usage in the USA, followed United Kingdom, Japan, Canada and Germany, and then Australia, Netherlands, Vietnam, Switzerland, Spain and many more)

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Furthermore, since the bootstrapping phase and throughout full governance, Govtool has supported large amounts of:

• Proposals in the proposal discussion section

• Votes on GAs from DReps

• Ada delegated to DReps by ada holders

• DReps registrations

• 65+ sessions of the governance tools WG.

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Govtool’s open APIs have enabled multiple community builders to provide value, such as:

• https://cardanobudget.com/

• https://www.1694.io/en

• https://tempo.vote/

• https://governancespace.com/en-us/budget-discussions

• https://governancespace.com/en-us

• https://budget.cardano.africa/

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Furthermore, Cardano Govtool’s fast support has enabled the Cardano community to have this Budget Proposal submission process available in record time, keeping it still open for integration via OpenAPIs.

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The distributed model, which connects multiple applications in one cohesive experience, allows multiple builders and many individual participants to develop and evolve Govtool’s applications in parallel, as well as allowing anyone to take any part of Govtool as a reference implementation. This has encouraged wide positive support and participation so far.

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We believe the participation, usage, and value leveraged by other tools shows clear support to continue this effort, making it more and more structured, more and more efficient, and lean as we progress.

The delivery and progress of Cardano GovTool are dependent on the overall support and participation from the community, making sure everyone feels ownership of the tools to participate in their government. On the development side, the applications that make up Govtool are dependent on different libraries. These dependencies are managed directly by the maintainers.