Cardano Multi Asset Treasury (CMAT)

Governance
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What an exciting era to live in! We faced the first batch of treasury unlocking proposals and we soon reached our NCL for 2025. While the community has shifted the attention towards F14 recently, it is indeed a good time to look back and get ready for 2026. Among various controversies, the topic below caught my interest.

What proposals should be eligible to receive grants?

With my finance background, I naturally use the investment angle to look at community grants. Investors would support for-profit projects since they could share the private profits. However, the community grants will not receive any similar shares which creates an imbalance in the value alignment. While investors risk their capital to enjoy the upside of the exact projects that they funded, we can only hope for the “side benefit” of “growing the ecosystem” if our grants support private projects.

Imo this creates massive value misalignment between our community as an “investor” to any private for-profit projects being funded. After some thought I genuinely believe any private projects should not receive grants directly from the treasury as the value for money is extremely difficult to justify,

However, if we apply this logic to treasury, the scope of fundable activities will be extremely restricted to open source endeavours and community building activities, limiting the growth of our ecosystem. While I am not discarding the importance of all for-profit projects in our ecosystem (including myself!), so how should these diverse projects potentially do good for our community get funded and started?

Alternative Funding Forms

Although not everyone tries to analyze the nature of grants in depth, our community is wise enough to sense that there is something wrong with funding private projects with treasury grants. Not long after Snek, our largest memecoin by market cap, proposed a 5 millions treasury withdrawal for token listing, a massive discussion was triggered around whether we should fund this proposal.

While quite a lot of people expressed their concerns on value alignment as aforementioned, the supporters also made a great point on how the success of SNEK can bring value across other CNTs as well. With respect to the feedback, the Snek team withdrew the original proposal and restructured the 5 millions proposal into a loan instead.

This innovation gives a lot of inspiration to how other projects approach public funding. DeltaDeFi is no exception, especially as we have recently been planning through different possibilities of fundraising. Seeing Snek structuring the treasury withdrawal as loan, plus the ring-a-bell from Alex, it reminds me of a dimension of seeing treasury funding in traditional flavour, and we are exploring a brand new option - token fundraising from treasury. It is considered equity like investment, making more sense and well aligned to unlock treasury money for for-profit endeavours.

The Multi-assets Cardano Treasury

Despite the interesting idea, our current Cardano treasury only supports ADA. So we technically cannot propose anything like “token fundraising from treasury” anyhow. This dragged me even further from the origin. Further discussion and insights from our friends at Mesh, who keep a close eye on web3 governance at the wider web3 space and their remarks on multi-asset-treasuries at other ecosystems triggered the final thoughts on which this article focuses:how about the idea of making Cardano treasury with multi-assets support?

With multi-assets support, Cardano treasury can accept CNTs, and accept proposals request for CNTs. This opens up a range of possibilities other than simply token raising from treasury, such as:

  • Token donation & withdrawals - people could send any possible CNTs into treasury while Ada holders stay in full control of the later use of treasury withdrawal proposals determined in various treasury assets
  • Stable repayment to treasury - for proposals like Stablecoin DeFi Liquidity, it could return to the treasury in stablecoin at its shut down, rather than forcing conversion back to ADA
  • Strategic treasury management - we as community can decide and vote on holding other assets rather than purely ADA in our treasury
  • Partnerchains can now build models in which partnerchain assets are fed/linked into the Cardano Treasury, building not only technical, but also financial bridges across the Cardano Partnerchain ecosystem
  • Annual Cardano core infrastructure proposal payments in stablecoins to provide a more secure and stable annual maintenance to Cardano most crucial projects

And there are countless other potentials.

A multi asset treasury furthermore is nothing too crazy either and is already implemented at other web3 ecosystems with onchain governance & treasury. Cardano, being a bit late with onchain governance & treasury has a second mover advantage and we spend quite some time observing and studying how other ecosystems explored and established their multi asset treasuries.

(see Polkadot Treasury, holding DOT, USDC/USDT, as well as tokens from its para-chains)

If that’s a good idea, what’s next?

This article tries to start the early discussion and obtain wider community opinion and feedback. If solid interests arise, an info action would be submitted to further obtain a checkmark from the community.

Once it passed we in SIDAN Lab & Mesh will start the process of CIP drafting to standardize all technical changes needed across the community, facilitating the update of the core node, indexers, SDKs, onchain DSL etc. We anticipate that these can take a full year of work, and yes, we are ready and committed to take the lead on exploring and establishing the CMAT and to work and collaborate with other entities and contributors which aim to support the CMAT and its journey!

As of now, the immediate follow up steps we take are:

November 2025: Hosting a “Cardano Multi Asset Treasury” workshop at Cardano Summit Day0 with support from the Cardano Foundation. One outcome of the workshop could be a initial info-action draft which will be submitted onchain.

Let’s start thinking about it!

We invite all people intrigued by this to start discussion together, provide feedback. DM’s and the door of SIDAN Lab’s discord server, where we will communicate and coordinate further work are always open!

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One clarification tho. (since got a nice feedback on DM)
If Cardano Tresaury Ada assets would be transformed into stablecoins, think is fair to assume that only a certain % of ada treasury is being transformed into stables or other assets, not all of the Ada Treasury. E.g the NCL or so…

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Big fan of this idea @hinsonsidan

There was some talk in the Account Address Enhancement CIP about a change that might allow CNTs to be held in the Cardano treasury. Since that CIP appears to be moving forward, I think the chances are high that we can get all of the benefits you mention here using the canonical Cardano treasury without having to make a separate treasury for CNTs.

Link to the CIP discussion:

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Yea definitely see there is some technical details overlapped. If community loves the idea of CMAT, would definitely loop in to coordinate with authors of this CIPs.

Right now I am more of trying to do a general sense checking / idea collecting across the community. Think in the post-voltaire era, we can be more curated in terms of proposing CIPs, particular when getting supports from community in general first rather than going deep into technical details too early

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Some updates and next steps.
We finished to draft and submit an initial CPS to introduce the Cardano Multi Asset Treasury concept in more detail.

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Idea for the treasury
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CPS: ?
Title: Cardano Multi Asset Treasury (CMAT)
Category: Ledger
Status: Open
Authors: 
  - Hinson Wong - SIDAN Lab <hinson.wong@deltadefi.io> 
  - Felix Weber - Mesh <felix@meshjs.dev> 
  - Nicolas Cerny - Cardano Foundation <nicolas.cerny@cardanofoundation.org>
Proposed Solutions: []
Discussions:
  - https://forum.cardano.org/t/cardano-multi-asset-treasury-cmat/149984
  - https://github.com/cardano-foundation/CIPs/pull/1061
Created: 2025-10-26
License: CC-BY-4.0
---

Abstract

Cardano’s on-chain treasury (part of the Voltaire governance era) currently holds funds in ada (lovelace) only. However, there is growing interest in allowing the treasury to support multiple assets. This CPS serves as an initial documents to outline the motivation of Cardano multi asset treasury.

Problem

The Cardano treasury’s exclusive holding of ada (lovelace) creates financial instability for both the treasury and funding proposers. Proposers must denominate their requests in ada, yet their real-world costs are in fiat. This forces them to gamble on a fixed exchange rate in their budgets. Consequently, proposers bear all the financial risk: a drop in ada’s price can render their project underfunded and unviable, while a sharp price increase results in an inefficient over-allocation of community funds. This volatility makes sustainable, long-term budgeting impossible for proposers and complicates the treasury’s own capital management, creating a high-risk environment that can deter high-quality, long-term ecosystem development.

Use cases

Enabling the Cardano treasury to hold Cardano Native Tokens (CNTs) (including stablecoins) unlocks a range of possibilities beyond just ada funding:

  • Stable-Value Funding: Treasury Withdrawals can be denominated in stablecoins, providing reliable budgets not subject to ada’s volatility. For instance, critical infrastructure projects could receive annual payments in a USD-pegged stablecoin, ensuring stable maintenance funding for key Cardano projects. This is more predictable than equivalent ada payouts whose fiat value can fluctuate dramatically.

  • New Funding Models: Community funding can go beyond one-way payouts. Ideas like token-based loans, collateralized loans or investments from the treasury become more feasible when the treasury can hold CNTs. For instance, the treasury could offer a loan in stablecoin to a project, which repays later in that same stablecoin – avoiding any need to convert currencies. The treasury could even participate in token raises by receiving a project’s tokens in exchange for funding, aligning incentives between the ecosystem and for-profit endeavors.

  • Diverse Treasury Holdings: The community gains the ability to strategically manage treasury holdings by holding a mix of assets, not just ada. For example, by leveraging the on-chain governance model, the community could decide to keep a portion of the treasury in stablecoins as a hedge against market downturns, or hold partner chain tokens that have strategic value. (One community suggestion is that only a certain percentage of the ada treasury should be converted into other assets like stablecoins – not all of it – to balance growth vs. stability, for example the NCL budgets which can be determined in stablecoins.) Holding RWAs (Real World Assets) furthermore could path the way of Cardano manifesting physical holdings (real-estate), moving towards a full fletched network-nation not only in the digital/virtual but also in the physical space.

  • Token Donations and Deposits: Anyone could donate or return funds in any CNT. Community members or partner organizations might send their native tokens (including stablecoins) to the treasury as contributions. This expands the treasury’s resource pool beyond ada – e.g. a DeFi project that raised funds in a stablecoin could return unused funds directly in that stablecoin to the treasury, rather than converting back to ada.

  • Cross-Chain Collaboration: A multi-asset treasury can strengthen partnerships with Cardano’s partner chains. These networks could contribute their native tokens to Cardano’s treasury as part of collaboration agreements. This creates financial bridges; for instance, if an IOU token from a sidechain or a governance token from a partner blockchain, which are represented as CNTs on Cardano, is contributed to Cardano’s treasury, it effectively links the ecosystems.

Notably, multi-asset treasuries are not without precedent. Other blockchain ecosystems with on-chain governance have already implemented similar features. Polkadot, for example, has a treasury that holds DOT (its native coin) plus assets like USDC, USDT, and even tokens from its parachains. Cardano, coming later to on-chain governance, can leverage these lessons as a second mover – implementing a multi-asset treasury in a careful, informed way.

Goals

The good solution to this CPS consists of 3 components:

  1. Well articulated proposals considering below:

    • A new CIP for multi asset treasury covering below areas:

      • Exact specification to describe the ledger change
      • Analysis to take network security into account
      • Other ledger rule’s technical consideration such as min ADA

    • Update on existing CIPs such as CIP-1694.

    • Amend the Cardano Constitution.

  2. Submit an Info Action of the CIP to gauge community sentiment if this is a requested change.

  3. Implementation of the CIP (likely including passing governance action to initial hardfork in updating ledger)

Out of Scope

  • The whitelisted assets to be included in the Cardano Multi Asset Treasury
  • The conversion and management of the multi-assets in the treasury

Open Questions

Coordination with work-in-progress CIP159

There is a work-in-progress CIP proposal (CIP159), where part of the outcome could serves the CMAT purpose. What level of coordination with other community CIPs is desirable?

Spam Prevention - Only Allow Whitelisted Tokens

Spam prevention as if only whitelisted tokens can send into the treasury. Do we want to build in this feature into CMAT?

  • For: Discussion in (CIP159) thread acknowledges the need for spam prevention
  • Against: Polkadot community mentioned whitelist is not needed as people just do not care

Spam prevention options:

  • Introduce new governance action type with the function to add-new-asset to the treasuy, the gov action would be governed as other gov actions (CIP1694). Also comes with the usual 100k GA deposit.

Technology Path in Implementation

There are several potential ways to implement CMATs:

  1. Cardano Wallet as Treasury

    Implementing CMAT through ledger updates which transform the current Cardano Treasury files into an actuall address which can receive, hold and distribute multi assets

  2. Multi Asset Stake Address as Treasury (CIP159)

    A CIP that adds support for depositing assets into account addresses (a.k.a. reward/staking addresses) which helps alleviate some of the pain-points from the minUTxOValue requirement. The CIP also provides a mechanism for plutus smart contracts to get a sense of the account’s current balance using account balance intervals similarly to how time is specified

  3. Cardano Smart Contract as Treasury

    A less technical challenging solution, deploying smart contracts which can receive, hold and distribute multi-assets under specific CIP1649 compatible rules

  4. Reference Polkadot Implementation and deploy the open source tech stack

    Polkadot runs its Multi Asset Treasury address not on its relay chain, but on its partnerchain framework using substrate, substrate also implemented at Cardano for its L1 architecture would allow a similar approach
    What technology path is more ideal in pursuing CMAT?

Other Technical Consideration

  • How to make sure we do not expose additional vulnerability to Cardano ledger? Any accomodation with min ADA protocol parameter?
  • How to ensure only minimal burden is created to Cardano toolchains, such as indexers, wallets, open source SDKs etc.

Governance Implication

  • Turning budget into stable denominated by default?
  • Update on CIP-1694 to allow budget request in terms of Cardano Native Tokens but not limited to ADA
  • How to determine which assets the treasury should hold?
  • How are assets acquired or disposed?
  • Guardrail on asset management. How to ensure proper financial stewardship?

Copyright

This CPS is licensed under CC-BY-4.0.

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