Summary: Governance Hour – Tweag’s Core Cardano Infrastructure Proposal
In this episode of the Governance Hour, Nicolas Cerny (Governance Lead at the Cardano Foundation) speaks with Kristijan Kowalsky, Blockchain Ecosystem Growth and Partnerships Lead at Modus Create/Tweag. Tweag has been actively writing core code for the Cardano network since 2018, and this session focuses on their treasury withdrawal to fund the next chapter of infrastructure development.
Adapting to Community Feedback
Originally, Tweag submitted an extensive 18- to 24-month proposal covering 17 different infrastructure work packages. However, after listening to feedback from Delegated Representatives (DReps) regarding the current market conditions and the sheer volume of funding requests, Tweag decided to pivot. They cut the proposal’s duration and budget in half. The revised 12-month proposal asks for approximately 18 to 19 million ada (roughly $4.6 to $4.8 million) and focuses strictly on three essential deliverables: Peras, History Expiry, and Conformance Testing.
Pillar 1: Peras for Fast Finality
Currently, transaction finality on Cardano is highly secure but relatively slow. Kristijan Kowalsky compares the current experience to writing a physical check at a store, where both parties have to wait hours or days for the transaction to fully clear at the bank. Peras aims to change this by enabling fast finality, bringing the experience closer to swiping a credit card. This upgrade is crucial for retail users, enterprise adoption, and high-volume use cases like cross-border payments, where users and businesses need absolute assurance that their transactions are final within seconds or minutes. The team is pushing to deliver Peras directly to the mainnet rather than just a testnet.
Pillar 2: History Expiry for Stake Pool Operators
As the network prepares for higher throughput upgrades like Ouroboros Leios, the storage requirements for running a full node will increase drastically. This threatens the profitability and survival of smaller stake pool operators. History Expiry solves this by eliminating the need to store the entire history of the blockchain. Instead of maintaining a massive “warehouse” of data, stake pool operators will only need a “filing cabinet” of block headers, significantly reducing hardware costs and preserving network decentralization.
Pillar 3: Conformance Testing and Coordination
The final pillar ensures that as new, diverse node implementations are built on Cardano, they all strictly follow the same consensus rules. Kristijan Kowalsky emphasized that developing Cardano is no longer the sole responsibility of Input Output. The development landscape is highly decentralized, with multiple vendors like Tweag, PRAGMA, and Harmonic Labs working together. This requires deep coordination and continuous testing to ensure that protocol upgrades like Peras and Leios work seamlessly together without breaking the network.
Top Five Q&A (FAQ) about Tweag’s Infrastructure Proposal
Question 1: How did the proposal change after community feedback?
Answer: Tweag initially proposed an 18- to 24-month roadmap with 17 deliverables. After receiving feedback from DReps concerned about the timeline and budget, Tweag scaled the proposal down to a 12-month timeline. The budget was reduced to roughly 18 to 19 million ada, focusing exclusively on three high-priority items: Peras, History Expiry, and Conformance Testing.
Question 2: What is Peras, and why does the Cardano mainnet need it?
Answer: Peras is a protocol upgrade designed to provide fast transaction finality. Currently, waiting for complete settlement on Cardano can take a significant amount of time, which deters enterprise adoption. Peras aims to finalize transactions in seconds or minutes, making the network competitive with other layer 1 chains and suitable for retail and enterprise settlements.
Question 3: What is History Expiry, and how does it help stake pool operators?
Answer: History Expiry is a feature that reduces the massive storage requirements needed to run a Cardano node. Instead of storing the entire history of network receipts, operators only need to store block headers. This lowers hardware and operational costs, which is especially critical for smaller stake pool operators facing reduced rewards and impending network scale-ups like Leios.
Question 4: Is Input Output the only entity building core infrastructure?
Answer: No. While Input Output remains a critical part of the ecosystem, Cardano’s core development is now distributed among several independent vendors, including Tweag, PRAGMA, and Harmonic Labs. These teams coordinate closely to build, test, and upgrade the network in a decentralized manner.
Question 5: What improvements to the governance process were suggested during the session?
Answer: Kristijan Kowalsky suggested that evaluating highly technical treasury withdrawals is an overwhelming and unpaid task for DReps. To improve the process, he proposed establishing an independent panel of subject matter experts to review and temperature-check complex proposals, providing DReps with a reliable consensus to inform their voting decisions.
Tuesday, 2 June
16:00 – 17:00 UTC