Dear Cardano Community,
Earlier this month, Catalyst Team formally submitted roadmap proposal into an ongoing Cardano budget formation period. You can find the original Cardano forum post here for more reference. Following the extensive consultation period, the Catalyst Team has gathered feedback from across the ecosystem (including gov.tools platform) to help deepen our shared understanding of the roadmap and reinforce our commitment to transparency and accountability.
Below, you will find the answers to questions about Catalyst proposal bundled into five core themes, aimed at fostering clarity and ongoing dialogue.
Please don’t hesitate to continue sharing your questions or ideas in the comments. Our team is enthusiastic about maintaining the ongoing conversations.
Thanks again!
– Catalyst Team at Input Output
A: Overview
A total of ₳69,459,000 is being requested to support Catalyst’s funding activities, infrastructure development, and community engagement over the next 12 months. This includes:
- ₳64.3M to fund community-driven innovation, a RetroPGF pilot, and the operations required to run three funding rounds.
- ₳5.159M to continue development of Catalyst’s digital infrastructure - specifically the Catalyst UI/UX and Hermes backend systems.
B: Breakdown by workstream
- Community Funding and Operations
A total of ₳64,300,000 is requested for:
₳60M: Community Funding
To be disbursed to community builders and ecosystem roles based on community-voting decisions. Funding shall be allocated across three rounds launched over 12 months (Fund14, 15, 16 - targeting ₳20M each) to support an estimated 500-700 new Cardano projects across these funding categories:
- Cardano Concepts - Early-stage ideas and pilots
- Cardano Partners & Products - Later-stage pilots
- Cardano Open Developers - Open-source software development initiatives
- Cardano Open Ecosystem - Grassroots and community-driven, non-technical initiatives
₳1M: Retroactive Public Goods Funding (RetroPGF) Pilot
Launch a pilot program to reward completed, high-impact public goods such as developer tools, educational content, and potentially regional contributions.
₳3.3M: Fund Operations
Covers the full operational lifecycle of 3 funding rounds from planning and communications, through compliance, management of grantees, tooling and data publishing.
Breakdown:
- 70% - Staffing including FTE, subcontractors, and vendors
- 20% - Software licences and tooling
- 10% - Infrastructure costs
- Catalyst UI/UX and Hermes infrastructure R&D
A total of ₳5,159,000 is requested for:
- ₳2.48M for Catalyst interface design and development
- ₳2.68M for Hermes infrastructure development
Breakdown:
- 85% - Staffing including product, engineering and testing employees and contractors
- 10% - Infrastructure costs
- 5% - Technical audit
- Clarification on Catalyst Launch Events
The ₳400K budget is dedicated to Catalyst Fund launch events and Catalyst discovery workshops, which have proven instrumental in forging significant strategic partnerships, enhancing legitimacy and brand reputation, and fostering more ecosystem growth.
In 2024, the community approved the allocation of ₳1M ADA into Catalyst Working Groups and launching Fund12 in Barcelona plus 25 events worldwide, a collaboration between the Catalyst Team, Rare Network, and Sustainable ADA plus 25 community working groups hosts around the world.
This event series directly led to influential partnerships with globally-recognised organizations such as FC Barcelona, Techstars, Plastiks with Danone, United Nations Development Program. Each is now actively collaborating with or building directly on Cardano.
The 2025 allocation, though substantially smaller, aims to preserve impact while reducing costs, focussing on more targeted engagement. The reduced ₳400K budget will continue to support high-impact Fund15 and Fund16 launch events, made more cost effective with less aggressive timelines to secure venues and suppliers. This will be complemented by a modest number of community-hosted satellite events & discovery workshops building on the activities of 2024’s Catalyst Working Groups initiative. These regional events are intentionally designed to attract influential industry stakeholders, facilitate valuable in-person collaboration, and provide focused opportunities to reflect on Catalyst’s strategic priorities and identify areas for improvement.
Approximately two thirds of this budget will be spent on the Fund launch events while the remainder funding will support a streamlined but still impactful community-operated Catalyst working groups events series in 2025, ensuring prudent use of resources and community-collaboration while continuing to deliver meaningful outcomes and strategic insights to the community.
A: Catalyst Foundation Company & Catalyst Treasury
- What is the Catalyst Foundation Company (CFC)?
Since Fund10, IOG Catalyst Team has focussed on further professionalizing the Catalyst program to ensure it operates as a well-governed and globally scalable initiative. As part of the mandate granted under the Fund10 Fund Operations Proposal, IOG was tasked with creating legal and regulatory clarity for all participants, which led to the formation of Catalyst Foundation Company.
The Catalyst Foundation Company (CFC) is a Cayman Islands Foundation company established to act as a neutral legal vehicle that holds funds from the Cardano Treasury, following decisions made by the community through the Cardano budget process. The CFC has no owners and no employees and is not an operational entity in the traditional sense. Its role is limited to receiving and disbursing funds according to the will of the Cardano community, not to make discretionary decisions on who gets funded.
The CFC follows a process intentionally designed to be neutral and transparent. Should the Cardano community vote to allocate funds to Catalyst, those funds will be transferred to CFC and subsequently deposited with a regulated custodian (currently Zodia). Each month, based on milestone completion, the CFC releases payments to eligible grantees. The IOG Catalyst team administers this process - reviewing milestones, managing reporting and coordinating disbursements - based on mandates approved by the Cardano community.
Establishing CFC has brought several important advantages including:
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Legal clarity for grantees - provides a clear and identifiable counterparty for grantees to meet local regulatory, tax and legal requirements.
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Structural separation - Provides arms-length separation between the custody of funds and the administrative team managing the disbursement of those funds ensuring legal clarity, trust, and reducing conflict of interest.
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Improved governance - Catalyst is better equipped to scale with strong governance and accountability.
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Fund security - Ensures that funds are held by a regulated custodian, with industry-gold standard security practices, and only disbursed to projects based on their progress, or to ecosystem governance roles such as proposal or milestone reviewers.
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Transparency and sustainability - Ensures that Catalyst resources are managed in a way that is both transparent and aligned with the long term needs of the Cardano ecosystem.
- What exactly is the Catalyst Treasury?
The term Catalyst Treasury refers to funds held by CFC that the Cardano community has approved for withdrawal from the Cardano Treasury to be distributed as grants. The Catalyst Treasury is custodied by Zodia, an industry-leading, FCA-registered custody solution provider, and administered by the Catalyst Team at IOG under a community approved mandate based on the F10 proposal: Fund Operations by IOG Catalyst.
- Where is the Catalyst Treasury located?
You can view the Catalyst Treasury balances - including staking activity and grant disbursements - directly on-chain through our Gitbook page, which lists all custody and operational wallets. These custody wallets are organized per fund to simplify accounting.
The Catalyst Treasury is held in wallets owned by the CFC, which provides the legal and regulatory framework for managing and distributing funds to grantees. All transactions - including staking rewards and grant disbursements - are recorded on-chain and fully auditable, ensuring transparency for the community.
- What is the current balance of the Catalyst Treasury?
The balance of the Catalyst Treasury changes on bi weekly basis depending on the funds distribution schedule. Current balances can be tracked on chain via our Gitbook page that lists all custody wallets holding Treasury funds. These funds are currently staked and not delegated to any DRep with full intention to be set to always-abstain through a non-voting DRep, ensuring neutrality in governance.
- Are there costs associated with maintaining this setup?
Yes, maintaining a regulatory compliant and licensed custody arrangement for Catalyst involves ongoing operational costs. To cover these sustainably, Catalyst has implemented a self-funding mechanism whereby the Treasury funds are staked, and the resulting rewards are used to offset the associated expenses.
- How can the community audit disbursement timelines/vendor spending, especially with IOG in both dev & ops roles?
Since CFC was only established in February 2024, there has been limited opportunity to implement a cadence of reporting and transparency measures. However CFC is committed to getting into a regular cycle of information sharing, including publishing disbursements information and other updates through channels such as newsletters, projectcatalyst.io and the Annual Horizons report. As the organisation matures, CFC aims to provide the community with more visibility into how funds are allocated to reinforce its commitment to transparency.
B: Staking Management
- Who do the Catalyst treasury wallets stake to?
CFC uses Zodia’s regulated staking services. Neither IOG nor CFC operates their own stakepools nor do they select which stakepools to stake to. This ensures neutrality and arms length governance in staking operations.
- How is staking revenue used?
Staking rewards are used to cover the ongoing operational costs of maintaining a compliant and secure custody set up for the Catalyst Treasury. These costs include custodianship costs, regulatory compliance, anti-money laundering requirements such as KYC/KYB compliance and other administrative expenses for CFC.
The ADA earned from staking by CFC is not owned by the Catalyst Team, IOG, or any individual. It remains part of the Catalyst Treasury and is exclusively allocated towards sustaining the Catalyst governance structure and the needs of the Cardano ecosystem as a whole.
- How does this fit within the Constitution and its references to staking?
The current Catalyst Treasury was withdrawn from the Cardano Treasury prior to the ratification of the Cardano Constitution. As such, the constitutional requirements concerning treasury withdrawals - namely (i) oversight by an administration (ii) custody in a dedicated account, and (iii) prohibition on staking, do not retroactively apply to these legacy funds.
That said, Catalyst already complies with the first two principles. The funds are administered by a defined team and held with a designated custody provider, consistent with emerging best practices. The third principle - prohibition on staking - is not currently applied to the legacy funds, given their exemption as it expected that any rewards to cover CFC administration expenses described previously are temporary and depleting as Catalyst Treasury funds under administration are disbursed to funded projects approved before the Constitution was ratified.
However, we recognize that all future withdrawals from the Cardano Treasury for Catalyst activities will be fully subject to the constitutional framework. This includes adhering to all three stipulations, particularly the non-staking requirement. This is part of a broader effort to align Catalyst with the Constitution and the evolving governance framework of the Cardano ecosystem.
C: Undisbursed Funds
- What happens to funds that are not paid out to successfully voted-in projects?
All projects must meet the publicly monitored criteria outlined in their Statement of Milestones and/or project close-out documentation before receiving any payments. If a project fails to meet these requirements, it will enter a formal cancellation or termination process, as detailed here.
Funds that remain unused due to project termination or non-compliance are retained in the Catalyst Treasury and may be earmarked for future funding rounds.
At present, the Catalyst program is in the process of formalizing the treatment of unused funds, particularly as it works to close legacy funds (Fund2 through Fund9). This process is expected to conclude within approximately two months. Once complete, the Catalyst team will have a clearer view of any remaining funds and will develop strategies for their effective use. These may include reallocating surplus funds to future rounds by increasing category budgets.
This evolving framework not only brings clarity on how uncompleted projects will be handled but also supports the continuous development of the Catalyst grants’ Cancellation and Termination policy.
A: RetroPGF Framework:
- What frameworks or criteria will RetroPGF use to objectively evaluate and fairly recognize contributions, especially across diverse regions and contributor profiles?
The RetroPGF initiative is designed to objectively recognize and reward meaningful contributions within the Catalyst community for public goods already delivered in the Cardano ecosystem. We recognise the importance of clear frameworks and transparent criteria to ensure fairness, particularly across diverse regions and contributor profiles.
Our intention is to roll out a RetroPGF pilot later this year. This pre-pilot phase will provide us the necessary time and context to collaboratively explore, refine, and define the most suitable criteria and frameworks building on the evolution of the established Catalyst evidence-based accountability model.
Our Head of Product previously established the inaugural RetroPGF program within the Filecoin ecosystem and brings extensive experience in designing equitable and impactful recognition mechanisms. Lessons can be drawn from other blockchain ecosystems giving insights on what went well and what didn’t. Moreover, others will have the opportunity to contribute during Catalyst Working Group workshops, being scheduled with Membership and Community Committee at Intersect (MCC).
- How will RetroPGF avoid subjectivity?
To proactively address potential subjectivity, the Catalyst team is committed to:
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Empowering the community to decide which candidates should receive retroactive funding.
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Gathering extensive community input about the design of RetroPGF initiative’s processes through dedicated consultation sessions and open forums such as Catalyst working group workshops, ensuring criteria reflect broad stakeholder consensus.
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Collaborating closely with Intersect committees and other SMEs, leveraging their interest, expertise, and diverse perspectives to enhance objectivity. For example, we are exploring how to pilot this program so it rewards contributors from each and every major Cardano hub.
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Exploring the integration of onchain/online contributor and reputation data that becomes available within Catalyst, which may further support unbiased and data-driven decisions. While this is a long term goal, implementation of the pilot will lead to a discovery of requirements that become features and upgrades within the Catalyst platform.
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Through these deliberate steps, we will establish a RetroPGF program that transparently and objectively rewards contributors, reflecting the diverse values and impacts within our global community.
Hermes Infrastructure Deployment
A: Hermes Stability and Preparedness:
- Have sufficient metrics, benchmarks, dry-run tests, and fallbacks been established and validated prior to Hermes rollout in Fund14?
Yes, however to clarify: the version of Hermes that is being rolled out in Fund14 is the new Catalyst UI/UX. The production grade version of Hermes will continue to be developed throughout 2025 and final testing and release are expected to be a key outcome of the next 12 months, leading to decentralised infrastructure for distributed decision making.
The Catalyst team follows gold standard software development practices and processes. The progress of Hermes can be tracked in the Catalyst team’s open source Github repositories and provides an account of all the testing tasks. More information about the Catalyst repositories and deliverables can be tracked here.
A: Accessibility
- How will Catalyst ensure that mobile, multilingual, and low-bandwidth users can meaningfully participate in all Catalyst roles (proposers, reviewers, voters)?
Catalyst is committed to ensuring meaningful participation across all user groups, including those on mobile devices, using multiple languages or operating in low-bandwidth environments. To achieve this, our product, design, and engineering teams adhere to gold-standard software development practices. We leverage established methodologies including user-centered design, the double diamond process, outcome-based planning, accessibility and interaction design principles to deeply understand user constraints, needs, and behaviors.
- For the next 12 months, UI/UX development will focus on:
- Conducting comprehensive user research and testing to inform inclusive design choices.
- Prioritizing solutions for responsive and mobile-friendly interfaces, enabling smooth interactions across various devices and network conditions.
- Implementing multilingual capabilities to ensure critical content and functionality are accessible and understandable to a diverse global community.
- Optimizing for low-bandwidth performance by incorporating lightweight designs, data-efficient loading, and minimizing reliance on high-bandwidth resources.
- Catalyst follows these methodologies and continuously validates our approaches with real-world user feedback, ensuring an accessible, equitable, and engaging experience for all community roles proposers, reviewers, and voters alike.
END OF Q&A [please note that this page may receive periodic updates]
We invite you to come and engage in conversation with us below in comments or across social channels to discuss any and all of the points and proposed initiatives. Join us at @Catalyst_onX to stay up to date with each of these events and opportunities to share your voice.
Thank you to all DReps, contributors, committees, working groups, and many volunteers involved in this inaugural budget process. You’re not taken for granted and we appreciate you all.