Cardano’s treasury funded millions of ADA in projects last year.
Budget season 2026 is upon us. A NCL of 350M ADA has been passed. On schedule, Amaru came in with the first proposal of this budget season. 
Other proposals will start to come. Intersect will kick off their budget process which will take a large chunk of that NCL. Before that gets too far, I think we should look at what we funded last year from the Treasury. I asked around, seems no one else was doing this.
Rather than wait for someone else to step in, I’m willing to put in the work now when we benefit the most from it. I’m looking for feedback and if anyone is interested in assisting in these assessments. I have 6 categories I propose to rank on, thus our assessments will be using the same standards. Again, feedback - this can be modified.
Things that come to mind that I’d like to know:
- Were the projects on time?
- Did the milestones adhere to the Ekklesia proposals or were there any shifts or scope creep? Are the milestones submitted detailed and provide evidence?
- Can the public verify the work, such as code on github and website metrics?
- How transparent has the project been, if code are the commit messages helpful, is the release process public, is the progress shared publicly?
- Can we measure any ecosystem impact, is Cardano meaningful better because of it? Stars or forks on a repo, new wallet registrations from an event, web traffic metrics…
- Can we assess budget efficiency, like steady commits indicative of ongoing work, depth of commits (not just version bumps), real web traffic verified, standard development practices (which invites for collaboration)?
How?
This is not all visible at a glance anywhere. I can look at the Sundae site for the current status, dig in to see milestone submissions and who is past due on milestones - this can be obtained from the blockchain. I can look at Ekklesia to see the proposal that won the votes and compare it to the tracked milestones but this is manual or AI. I can use handy tools like ossinsight and similarweb, but again that is using human interpretation. I realize many of these proposals are at a halfway point and not completed but still feel an assessment of current progress is valuable.
I have a spreadsheet that’s open if anyone wants to participate. We provide links used in our decision making and a brief line on why we rank the number we did in that category.
In Parallel
We have a dev working on a dashboard and deeper dives on automatic assessments. This is not funded, we’re just doing our best to help the community. My favorite feature is seeing how many projects are on time or behind at a glance. It’s very much a work in progress but we’re hopeful to get all the pieces working.
That’s it. I’m looking for feedback and maybe people interested in assisting me by assessing some of these proposals with me.
