Catalyst Representative Pilot F14

[Alex_Maaza]

Cardano Foundation introducing a pilot for the upcoming Representative role on Catalyst.

In this pilot, Foundation subject-matter experts will review proposals within their fields of expertise and provide recommendations to the community to assist with informed voting. The pilot will serve as a platform to utilize expertise both from community members within the Foundation and importantly, from community experts across the wider ecosystem via discussion in roundtable talks.

The Foundation will not actually vote on recommendations made by these subject matter experts in F14.

We anticipate that the Representative role will be officially introduced in upcoming Catalyst funds and expanded to subject-matter experts in the wider community, and we welcome the enhanced diversity of the subject-matter expertise which it will bring.

During this pilot, across the Foundation, experts who are active community members within the Cardano ecosystem will review proposals under the following categories and make their recommendations on promising proposals:

Cardano Open: Developers for proposals featuring innovative tools or specialized building blocks that don’t already exist, solve real problems for many developers, and deliver reusable value beyond niche use cases.

Cardano Open: Ecosystem & Cardano Use Cases: Concepts for proposals related to:

1. Developer Growth: proposals that foster education, tooling, and community support to onboard, upskill, and retain developers for long-term success.
2. Governance: proposals delivering MVP-level governance tooling/UX for governance bodies (DReps, SPOs, CC) or running short-term research/community programs with clear, verifiable governance KPIs.
3. Sustainability: proposals for legacy and blockchain-native use cases, research, education, and events that positively impact Cardano adoption, aligned with sustainability frameworks such as the UN SDGs.
   We will share the final list of recommendations publicly, but will not vote in these categories.

Roundtable Talks

To strengthen Catalyst’s decision-making and transparency, we encourage community members with subject-matter expertise (e.g., DeFi, Enterprise, Interoperability, etc.) to share their insights with voters. This will enable the community to make better-informed decisions given the high volume of proposals.

As part of this pilot, we will select participants who reflect a broad set of expertise themes to take part in one of two Community Roundtable Talks taking place during the voting period for Fund 14 (22 September – 6 October 2025).

Apply to participate in a Community Roundtable Talk [here]

To participate, please upload a post on the Cardano Forum’s Project Catalyst sub-category and tag it with the tag “catalyst-rep-pilot” by 22 September 2025, which includes:

• Your chosen expertise as a Representative
• A clear definition of your expertise theme
• Evidence of your expertise
• Selection of proposals reviewed
• Your review methodology

With these steps, the Cardano Foundation is evolving its role in Project Catalyst — contributing as one of many players in the ecosystem, and working to complement and empower the community’s expertise, diversity, and innovation.

[Jsierrax]

Create a platform for roundtable discussions between Foundation experts and wider community experts

Thoughts on Roundtable Selection Transparency

Thanks for sharing this, Alex — the Representative Pilot looks like a solid step to help voters cut through the noise. From my perspective (personal, but with a Product lens), the roundtable format has real potential to surface strong insights for developer, governance, and sustainability proposals.

One thought for the longer term: selection transparency will be key. Since the process is CF-led today, involving the community in choosing roundtable members (through community-wide mechanisms such as elections, nominations, or signaling votes) would strengthen legitimacy and better reflect Cardano’s decentralization ethos — inside and out.

That way, roundtables could truly blend Foundation and community expertise, while keeping Catalyst as the community’s engine of innovation.

Curious to hear how others imagine a community-based selection model working in practice.

[Alex_Maaza]

@Jsierrax

Create a platform for roundtable discussions between Foundation experts and wider community experts

Before addressing the rest of your thoughtful post, I want to level set. there are Cardano experts all across the ecosystem and they wear different hats. In some cases they work for genesis entities. There is no CF experts / community experts dichotomy. A community member - constitutionally - is an ada holder. we’re all community experts and we work different day jobs, some within Cardano, some outside of it!

[Jsierrax]

Thanks for clarifying that, Alex — I really like the way you frame it: we’re all community members first, just wearing different hats at different times. That’s an important highlight.

What I was aiming to bring forward is the process side. The pilot already looks strong, and I think adding more visible selection transparency over time could make it even more powerful — showing the wider community how bottom-up input and expertise come together.

From my perspective, that would only reinforce the decentralization ethos that makes Cardano unique, while giving Catalyst a governance model that can scale with confidence into Vision 2030.