Funding this proposal ensures the Cardano community continues to have access to a maintained and reliable Cardano.nix toolset. This benefits anyone deploying Cardano infrastructure (nodes, wallets, explorers) using Nix, including SPOs, developers, and enterprises. The value lies in providing reproducible, robust deployment methods, reducing configuration errors and setup time. The ROI is improved infrastructure reliability, easier onboarding for Nix users into Cardano, and support for key ecosystem players like IOG and the Daedalus Wallet team.

Securing ongoing funding for Pallas directly benefits the Cardano developer community by ensuring its continued reliability and performance as a key open-source resource for the Cardano ecosystem. Projects like Aiken, Lucid, Mithril, and Amaru already utilize Pallas to streamline development and reduce infrastructure complexity. By maintaining Pallas, we help developers focus on building applications rather than managing low-level blockchain details. This support strengthens the ecosystem’s developer tooling, makes it easier for new developers to contribute, and fosters innovation across various Cardano-based projects.

Securing funding for UTxO RPC ensures it remains actively maintained and continues to evolve with the Cardano ecosystem's needs. Ongoing updates, performance improvements, and new feature development will ensure the interface stays relevant and effective. This support will help simplify blockchain integrations, reduce complexity for developers, and improve overall performance, making it easier for new projects to adopt UTxO RPC. With continued maintenance, UTxO RPC can better serve the ecosystem and support long-term developer needs.

Securing funding for Dolos will ensure its continued maintenance, optimization, and feature expansion, directly benefiting projects that rely on fast and lightweight access to Cardano ledger data. Continued improvements will enhance performance, reduce infrastructure overhead, and support a broader range of use cases. By keeping Dolos actively maintained, the Cardano developer community gains a robust and efficient alternative to traditional node setups, lowering operational costs and improving blockchain data accessibility.

If implemented, what would be the benefit and to which parts of the community? Please include the demonstrated value or return on investment to the Cardano Community. The benefits of this proposal directly reflect the positive outcomes of addressing the identified problem. Based on the analysis, the key benefits include:

• Increased Accessibility: Translating materials into Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese (Mandarin), and Italian—alongside the original English—will make Hydra documentation accessible to a much broader global audience, covering over 2.6 billion speakers worldwide.
• Improved Understanding: A step-by-step tutorial video in English with subtitles in the additional target languages will significantly enhance comprehension, especially for non-technical users, by offering clear and visual instructions. This aligns with the documented need for beginner-friendly resources.
• Easier Node Setup: The video guide will help users more easily set up and run Hydra nodes, reducing technical barriers and potentially increasing participation in the protocol.
• Promotion of Inclusion and Diversity: By reaching non-English-speaking communities, the proposal promotes inclusion and aligns with Cardano’s core values—as demonstrated by initiatives like Cardano Community Translations.
• Potential Growth in Hydra Adoption: Making Hydra more accessible could lead to greater usage, directly supporting Cardano’s scalability goals in the Basho era, as outlined in the Cardano roadmap.

The Ada Labs for Blockchain Applications (A.L.B.A.) Network addresses this gap by deploying Cardano nodes across prestigious universities worldwide.

This initiative:

Leverages Cardano’s Academic DNA: Aligns with Cardano’s origins in academia (supported by 239 peer-reviewed papers) to build institutional trust and credibility. Prepares for Government Adoption: Establishes a low-cost, high-impact network of academic partners who will advocate for Cardano as governments seek guidance on mission-critical blockchain solutions. Mitigates Competitive Risks: Counters the dominance of less reliable blockchains in key sectors by embedding Cardano as the academically endorsed standard for systems where failure is unacceptable. Creates Long-Term Advocacy: Positions universities as hubs for Cardano-based innovation, ensuring future developers, policymakers, and industry leaders are trained on and loyal to Cardano’s ecosystem. By planting these seeds now, the A.L.B.A. Network ensures Cardano becomes the default choice for high-stakes applications, directly translating academic rigor into real-world adoption and governance influence.

Implementing this proposal would yield significant benefits across various segments of the Cardano community:

• Enhanced Blockchain and Cardano Awareness: By providing accessible tools tailored for SMEs, this initiative will elevate the visibility of Cardano and its capabilities within the small and medium enterprise sector.
• Increased Adoption Rates: Simplifying blockchain integration for SMEs is anticipated to introduce thousands of new users to the Cardano ecosystem, fostering broader community engagement.
• Attraction of Diverse Enterprises: With user-friendly solutions for payments, supply chain tracking, and smart contracts, more SMEs are likely to adopt Cardano-based applications, expanding the commercial use cases within the network.
• Strengthened Ecosystem Sustainability: A surge in transactions from SME activities will generate additional fees, benefiting stake pool operators and contributing to the Cardano treasury.

The return on investment includes a more robust and self-sustaining ecosystem. By lowering entry barriers for SMEs, this project not only amplifies Cardano's real-world utility but also stimulates network growth, potentially surpassing the initial investment through increased economic activity and treasury contributions.

This proposal enhances the Daedalus Wallet by improving performance, governance participation, and scalability, ensuring its long-term viability in the Cardano ecosystem.

Key Benefits: Better User Experience: LSM integration and Mithril research reduce memory usage and improve sync times.

Stronger On-Chain Governance: A fair and transparent DRep selection interface empowers ADA holders to make informed delegation decisions.

Enhanced Scalability: Exploring Layer 2 bridges (Hydra, Midgard) and hybrid wallet integrations expands interoperability.

Long-Term Security & Maintenance: Regular updates keep Daedalus secure, preventing obsolescence.

Return on Investment (ROI): Higher adoption & retention of full-node users.

Stronger decentralization by making full-node participation more accessible.

Future-proofing Cardano with L2 support and governance improvements.

Who Benefits? ✅ Full-node users (faster, leaner Daedalus) ✅ ADA holders & voters (better DRep selection) ✅ DReps (fairer visibility & competition) ✅ Stake pool operators & developers (L2 adoption & transaction growth)

This proposal ensures Daedalus remains a powerful full-node wallet, supporting decentralization, governance, and scalability in the Cardano ecosystem. 🚀

The proposed solution will have multiple positive impacts on the Cardano community. First, it will provide a new, robust infrastructure for NFT and IoT data storage, contributing to the Cardano ecosystem’s service capabilities. Second, by allowing Cardano Stakepool Operators to act as storage nodes, it introduces an additional revenue stream, making stake pool operations more profitable and thereby encouraging more participation. This incentivizes further decentralization, enhancing network resilience. We will measure impact through metrics such as the number of active SPOs participating in the storage network, volume of data stored, number of dApps using our storage, and increased stake pool rewards. Outputs and opportunities will be shared openly via GitHub, community reports, and regular updates through Project Catalyst channels and other community forums. Additionally, we will conduct dedicated workshops for Stakepool Operators, publish technical documentation, and organize community Q&A sessions to foster engagement, transparency, and broad adoption across the community. Unlike IPFS and similar networks, the data lattice is not made up of anonymous nodes. A storage provider can offer its services directly to users. An SPO or groups of SPOs can band together to offer more capacity or storage redundancy. SPOs can advertise their services and create an ecosystem dedicated to them, locking future revenue. This will open economic opportunities unmatched by competitors and give unique opportunities to node operators.

Implementation would democratize and significantly expand access to real estate investment across Latin America by enabling fractional ownership, increasing liquidity, and reducing regulatory hurdles. The Cardano community benefits from enhanced ecosystem visibility, increased total value locked (TVL) through integrated DeFi mechanisms, and sustainable use of the treasury with pay back of funds on the long term. Overall, this fosters ecosystem growth, attracts both crypto-native and traditional investors, and reinforces Cardano’s competitive positioning in the fast-growing tokenized Real World Assets (RWA) market.

This proposal will provide consistent and high-quality marketing content to raise awareness of top Cardano projects.

It will:\n

Enhance project visibility and education through 90 short-form videos.

Increase engagement, driving a minimum of 990,000 impressions and 5000 interactions across 45 weeks.

Expand the Cardano community by targeting 500 new Discord members and 2,000 new Twitter followers.

Support onboarding of at least 500 new users to featured Cardano projects.

Strengthen collaboration by featuring 40+ distinct Cardano projects.

Improve public perception and Cardano’s competitive positioning in the blockchain space.

If implementation of new Cardano features and breaking changes is not completed then hardware wallets may become incompatible with Cardano, stopping users from accessing newer blockchain features or stop working altogether.

If regular maintenance, bugfixing and developer support is not completed, wallets may lack functionalities and development of tooling that is using HW wallets may become impossible or much more difficult.

Starstream supports use-cases that require private computation (necessary for many RWA use-cases) enabling a new category of apps to exist on Cardano. It does this while also allowing for near-zero cost of batching txs which massively improves scalability even for DeFi use-cases

Reitcircles is working with real world builders in this segment to address this topic. So that the funds are managed in a professional setup using blockchain and allow all the goodness of blockchain such as instant settlement, transparency, DAO driven consensus for fund management etc.