Like @lodl_de suggested, I think all of the points here are good starting points for debate & improvement when considered also with their opposite. I only have to object to #4 above:
The proposal to transfer Catalyst to the Cardano Foundation — the least accountable entity in the ecosystem, the one whose officers bear no financial stake in outcomes and face no meaningful community sanction for poor decisions — is not a reform. It is the institutionalisation of the failure.
I am one of those Catalyst proposers who has capitalised upon the bias toward “proposal-writing skill” — in fact most of my bids (all but one) were for support of my editing work on standards proposals. I never doubted that this would provide a good starting point for each of my own proposals via a high review score, but this was also my first sign something was wrong: observing that deliberately slanted or biased reviews could never be challenged (this was also my first indication that the lack of accountability in IO Catalyst was likely “by design”).
Over the following 4 years I realised this principle had been institutionalised throughout Catalyst operations and administration. What I observed there, based on communication with about 3 top-level decision makers, was an extreme example of oligarchy whose rulings could never be challenged… with most proposers likely afraid to, given the absolute power the elites were given to cancel projects or deny funding disbursement indefinitely.
Early in that period, I also was told by the Catalyst lead himself that proposers were always expected to dump their ada for a stablecoin or fiat as soon as it was received. If accusing the CF executives of having no regard or responsibility for “ADA price” I would also try to find from where in the IO structure the standing order came to dump ada instead of holding it as a legitimate long-term personal & project asset.
In the last year of that period, I was also told that:
- my work reported regularly to Catalyst and the public through this repository was actually the work of other people (CIP co-editors) and therefore inadmissible… but also that my own authorship could be proven somehow with “screenshots”;
- that GitHub links were not admissible as evidence of work done on GitHub, and therefore also required “screenshots” (this was retracted, with difficulty, upon lengthy & uncertain appeal);
- Catalyst funding could no longer be used for continuous projects like CIP editing (one of the most essential & decentralised parts of the Cardano ecosystem) since projects must “wait until funds are approved” before beginning the work;
- a medical continuance of 1 year, granted for a Fund 11 project, was used to disqualify me from participating in Fund 15 because “milestones were achieved late” even though meeting the revised targets based on that 1 year extension approved by the Catalyst Team itself.
The final two factors put an end to Catalyst funding of Cardano’s CIP process: after a total 38-month period ending with November 2025. Ending this way was especially interesting because the head of the Catalyst Team had told me several times he was “a big fan of the CIP process” — more proof of @T_Tefera’s assertion that we can never depend on individuals, since their withdrawal of funding eligibility was the greatest threat that Cardano’s standards process has ever faced.
Now what makes us think the Cardano Foundation would do any better with Catalyst?
When I was being tormented again in the final fund by arbitrary reviews — and organisational statements like this one from Emurgo implying that standards & education have nothing to do with adoption — the technical contingent at the CF produced this humbly amazing analysis of the development proposals in that generation:
Anyone familiar with the socially hobbled Catalyst review process, with its deliberate dependence upon UNqualified review and crowd-sourcing as “evidence” of decentralisation, will be encouraged by this application of technical rigour to social parameters… a potential, perhaps not yet publicly acknowledged, that makes the CF uniquely qualified for this administrative role.
Because of the concentration of community oriented technical experts at the Foundation, they have the largest population of such proposal analysts in the Cardano community and therefore the greatest potential to use those skills — both in assessment and administration — to establish and maintain accountability in Catalyst: not only from proposers; but from reviewers, from any third-party administrators, and from themselves.
My own diverse & mostly unique role in the Cardano community puts me in contact frequently with CF engineers, product leads, project managers, and community advocates. Even if it were true that these people are only overseen distantly by an elite board with “no accountability” for asset value, this body of specialists would still be working constantly for Cardano’s ecosystem value… and I would expect that to be just as true for Catalyst as it is for everything else.