This Treasury Withdrawal funds 12 months of full active maintenance and development for GovTool, the open-source, community-owned set of governance tools that form Cardano’s core low-barrier platform for participation in on-chain governance.

GovTool enables ada holders to register, delegate, propose, vote, and transparently view outcomes. It is actively maintained and expanded by the Cardano GovTool Consortium which consists of ByronNetwork, WeDeliver, LidoNation and Dquadrant with additional open source contributors, guided by the Governance Tools Working Group.

Funding will ensure operational stability, incentivisation for community contributions, support for other open source governance tools using GovTool open-source code and APIs, and deliver accelerated functional updates across all governance pillars. Any unused funds will be returned to the Cardano Treasury.

This Treasury Withdrawal is submitted by Govtool consortium. The Abstract, Motivation, Rationale, and Vendor Profiles are drawn from the approved budget Info Action and refined to meet the constitutional requirements for a treasury withdrawal.

This withdrawal follows the approved budget Info Action for ₳1.15M and it will be administered by Intersect MBO via smart contract framework, fulfilling the constitutional requirement to detail the proposed solution, its alignment to the approved budget, and the amount to be withdrawn.

This proposal addresses the risk of governance participation becoming fragmented or dependent on closed-sourced, privately-owned, commercialised tools. In Cardano’s Voltaire era, without an open, neutral, and accessible platform like GovTool, Cardano’s decentralisation and democratic legitimacy would be weakened.

GovTool is already widely used:

• 48,000+ unique mainnet users across 170+ countries
• Thousands of governance transactions initiated
• Deep integration with ecosystem tools (1694.io, cardanobudget.com, tempo.vote, Governancespace.com, budget.cardano.africa, 1694.tools, and others)

Funding will preserve and expand this infrastructure, sustain its open source nature, and ensure it continues to serve as a public good underpinning Cardano governance. Furthermore it will onboard more individual contributors making maintenance more distributed and efficient going forward.

• Open GovTool repository (voting and delegation)
• Proposal Pillar repository
• Outcomes Pillar repository

Project Solution

The funding will deliver:

• Level 1 - Foundational Maintenance (₳412.5K): hosting, security, CI/CD, and a core maintenance team to ensure uninterrupted service.
• Level 2 - Incentivised Participation (+₳250K): direct contributor rewards for open repositories and funding for other open-source governance tools leveraging GovTool code/APIs.
• Level 3 - Active Development (total ₳1.15M): dedicated FTEs for Proposals, Delegation, Voting, Outcomes, and Budget Discussions pillars, plus full end-to-end testing and guaranteed monthly updates.

Any unused funds will be returned to the Cardano Treasury.

Vendor Profiles

The Cardano GovTool Consortium is made of all the builders currently actively working on the development of GovTool, the builders of tools who leverage Govtool APIs and code, and anyone who actively participates in the Governance tools working group. The following builders who are submitting this governance action are leading the Consortium effort:

• LidoNation - Outcomes pillar
• ByronNetwork - Delegation & Voting pillars
• WeDeliver - Proposal Discussion & Budget Proposals pillars
• DQuadrant - End-to-end testing

These teams have been building governance tools since before CIP-1694, through SanchoNet GovTool, Voltaire GovTool, and the Plomin upgrade. All code is open-source and maintained in public repositories, with contributions from a global community of developers.

Contract Management

A written off-chain Legal Contract will be created between the vendors and Cardano Development Holdings (CDH), administered by Intersect, detailing delivery schedules, milestones, and dispute resolution processes.

Project Delivery

Milestones, acceptance criteria, payment amounts, and timelines will be agreed between Intersect and the vendors. Vendors will deliver according to the Legal Contract, with milestone completion attested by the vendors and verified by Intersect or a 3rd Party Assurer.

Intersect’s delivery assurance function will monitor progress and communicate status to the community. A 3rd Party Assurer will review and sign off milestone deliverables before payments are released.

Budget Management Tooling

Intersect will use the treasury management smart contract framework developed by Sundae Labs, audited by TxPipe and MLabs. Funds will be held in a Treasury Reserve Smart Contract (TRSC) and disbursed to Project-Specific Smart Contracts (PSSCs) as milestones are met.

The Oversight Committee — consisting of Sundae Labs, Cardano Foundation, DQuadrant, Xerberus, and NMKR — will verify key administrative actions on-chain.

A public dashboard will allow the community to audit fund flows, track milestones, and verify spending immutably on-chain.

Specifics

Intersect will utilize a single Treasury Reserve Smart Contract (TRSC), with many Project-Specific Smart Contracts (PSSC), managed by Intersect. Intersect's management consists of three 'admin' and two Intersect 'leadership' roles. An Oversight Committee consisting of five external, independent third-party entities will provide checks and balances on Intersect, and safeguard against errors and unilateral control. The administration of both TRSC and PSSCs will be managed by Intersect, with external oversight on certain actions from the Oversight Committee.

The Oversight Committee consists of Sundae Labs, Cardano Foundation, Xerberus and NMKR. Their role is to independently verify key administrative actions using on-chain logic, ensuring accuracy and consistency without exercising discretion over governance decisions.

For all details on Intersect's configuration please see the Smart Contract Guide on the knowledgebase.

The high level permissions are as follows:

• TRSC Fund and PSSC Modify
  • Two of the three Intersect admins, two of the five trusted entities and one of the two Intersect leadership sign-off must authorize
• TRSC Disperse
  • Two of three Intersect admins, three of five trusted entities and two of two Intersect leadership sign-off must authorize
• TRSC Pause and Resume
  • Two of three Intersect admins, and one of two Intersect leadership sign-off must authorize
• TRSC Sweep
  • One of three Intersect admins, and one of two Intersect leadership sign-off must authorize
• TRSC Reorganize
  • Two of three Intersect admins and three of five trusted entities must authorize

Processes

Upon enactment of this governance action, funding for this project will be directed into the TRSC's stake account. All instances of TRSC and PSSC can not be staked with a SPO and will be delegated to the auto-abstain predefined DRep. From here funds will be withdrawn into a UTxO remaining at the TRSC.

When the Legal contract is prepared and the vendor is ready, funding for this project will be transferred using the Fund action to a PSSC. All milestones will be outlined within the metadata.

A dashboard will be available for the community to audit the TRSC or PSSC and track metrics related to this withdrawn ada as well as being immutably verifiable on chain.

The subsections; Contract Management, Project Delivery, and Budget Management Tooling described above cover the constitutional requirements specified in Article IV section 4 and 5.

References

• Approved Budget Info Action in GovTool
• Sundae Labs Budget Management Smart Contracts Github Repository
• TxPipe Audit Report
• MLabs Audit Report
• Proposed roadmap
• Open Backlog
• Open GovTool repository (voting and delegation)
• Proposal Pillar repository
• Outcomes Pillar repository
• GovTool Test Reports
• GovTool open app analytics
• Open Constitutional Committee Portal Repository
• GovTool Docs
• GovTool Proposal Pillar API docs
• GovTool Outcomes Pillar API docs
• GovTool Voting and Delegation Pillar API docs
• Cardano Govtool X Account

Authors

• Darlington @ Lido Nation Foundation
• Stojan Ivanisevic WEDELIVER IT
• Byron Network
• Dquadrant