1. Postponement of Governance Action PCP 003
In adherence to the “No Governance December” social contract, the committee has officially delayed the enactment of PCP 003 until January.
- Reasoning: The network aims to avoid major parameter shifts while the Constitutional Committee (CC) is in transition and to prevent unnecessary stress on operators during the holiday period.
- Status: All technical preparations are complete; the action is ready for submission once the window re-opens.
2. Intra-Era Hard Fork: Plutus Primitives & Timelines
The committee discussed the upcoming hard fork (Protocol Version 11), which introduces significant enhancements to the Plutus smart contract platform.
- New Primitives: The update includes array primitives and multiscalar arithmetic, which are expected to improve script performance by 5% to 10%.
- Current Blocker: Implementation and benchmarking are not yet complete. This lack of finalized cost models is currently a “hard fork blocker,” as the committee cannot approve parameters without verified performance data.
- Legacy Support: The committee confirmed that these extensions are backward compatible and will not break existing dApps on Plutus V1 or V2.
3. Constitutional Committee (CC) Structural Changes
A proposal was debated to reduce the minimum CC size from seven to five members.
- The Problem: Currently, the resignation of a single member can “freeze” the governance process if the total count drops below the minimum threshold.
- The Debate: While there are concerns that a smaller group could increase “attack vectors” (making it easier to influence the treasury), the committee reached a consensus that five is a safe middle ground. This provides a buffer against unexpected resignations without compromising security to the extent that a three-person minimum might.
4. Incentives, CIPs, and the Ekklesia Ballot
The Incentives Working Group is preparing a community ballot via the Ekklesia platform to gather sentiment on key Cardano Improvement Proposals (CIPs).
- CIP 50 & CIP 163: These focus on refining the reward formula and stake pool incentives. The committee’s role is to validate that the ranges provided in the ballot are technically sound.
- The $L$ Parameter: This refers to the Incentives / Reward formula adjustment for block subsidies, aimed at balancing pool competitiveness.
- Min Margin (Dijkstra Era): There is a strong push to include the removal or adjustment of the minimum pool margin in the upcoming Dijkstra era to increase flexibility for Stake Pool Operators (SPOs).
5. Testing & Simulation Tools
The committee highlighted the Cardano Ignite tool, a simulation environment capable of spinning up 200 nodes and 25+ pools to test “chain split” scenarios. There is a collective effort to move testing of experimental hard forks away from the Preview network—to avoid disaster recovery risks—and toward SanchoNet or dedicated Ignite environments.