2027 Treasury withdrawals

Governance General Governance Conversation
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One of the clearest lessons from the first years of Cardano governance is that treasury proposals can quickly exceed what most DReps can reasonably review in depth.

This is not a criticism of DReps. The problem is structural.

Some proposals are simple enough for broad community review. Others involve protocol infrastructure, liquidity programs, legal structures, custody models, software maintenance, ecosystem growth claims or multi-year funding assumptions. These require subject matter expertise.

If we want to reduce DRep workload in a meaningful way we should be honest about the tradeoff, some form of filtering will have to take place.

There are so many options for how that filtering could take place but if the goal is to reduce what DReps have to evaluate directly, then someone is helping decide what is credible, comparable, ready or worth advancing.

That is not automatically bad. In fact, it may be necessary. But it should be transparent. And the community should be talking about it now. We just started Q4 and cannot afford to put off 2027 treasury planning to Q1.

There will be conflicts. Cardano is still a small ecosystem. The people most qualified to evaluate infrastructure, DeFi, open source, wallets, developer tooling, governance or adoption are often also building companies, writing proposals, advising teams or competing for funding.

How would YOU recommend ensuring we have a sound filtering process?
How would YOU recommend conflicts be handled? How do we prevent expert review from being called insider allocation?
Can we get a conversation started on these topics?

In addition to how projects ask for money, we could look at the Catalyst Pilot improvements. We fund projects but we often dont look back to see how it went, if it was a sound investment or if they need help. We dont talk about how we measure success. Should that assessment and potential action be it’s own conversation?

Christina

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Hello @musikc

This is the same issue that Catalyst had (one of many).

No one wanted to deal with it back then, so now it’s just been transplanted into governance.

My suggestion still is to have the community filter out the proposals by voting with their ADA + fees.

For example:

Every 60 to 90 days new proposals are shown for voting.

People bringing these proposals forward can campaign to have ADA holders vote for them.

Voting costs 0.05% of the voting power you use. So, you vote with 10,000 ADA (besides your transaction fee) you pay 5 ADA as your vote of support.

DReps (or whoever) take a look at voting results and start looking at proposals from most voted first, then go down the line.

They review what they can and all the other proposals they didn’t get to can keep their votes and try to accumulate more for next round.

If a proposal doesn’t make it high enough to get reviewed in 3 rounds it’s dropped and they have to start again.

All fees are collected and paid to Intersect so they can use them as incentives for reviewers.

No upper limit on the fee so whales don’t spam and it doesn’t become an attack vector.

Ideally, Intersect or CF would make a smart contract for voting.

It would be open to anyone.

A template would be provided on how to attach a proposal to a smart contract.

Have an open date and a submission deadline date.

Once the vote opens any ADA holder can vote with their snapshot.

ADA holders can vote for all or some while abstaining for others.

ADA holders can choose different levels of support for each proposal. (Example: one proposal support with 10k and another with 1k).

Once voted the contract will register support and charge fees for every vote.

Voting ends, results are shown, review starts.

Review time ends.

Process starts again.

There is of course a lot more in between. However, the main point is to get the community involved, attach cost + competition to proposals and to accept the fact that volunteers are not slaves.

I don’t see a way to do it with out cost attached. Maybe someone has better (non-Catalyst) idea. :sweat_smile:

P.S. There can be a separate process for Cardano official chain development, research and security. This suggestion is for all other proposals.

:blue_heart: :cardano: :blue_heart:

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I appreciate the reply and you sharing your thoughts on how we might handle next year’s funding requests.

I’m not sure asking voters to pay in order to signal support would be helpful. My concern is that it could reduce participation, especially from ordinary ADA holders who already have limited time and attention for treasury review.

I do like the out-of-the-box thinking, though. I agree we need better ways to reduce DRep overload, surface serious proposals earlier and fund meaningful review work.

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There is a CIP candidate which would enable ada holders to “vote” themselves — regardless of any DRep affilation — on all governance propositions, including those for Treasury withdrawals: