Overview - A Cardano Blockchain Ecosystem Budget

Governance Budgets 2025
22

The following opinions were expressed at the workshop regarding the new budget process :folded_hands:

Step 1
Evaluation by experts, knowledgeable people, and analysts

Step 2
Based on the evaluation, DREP volunteers, SPO volunteers, the above experts, knowledgeable people, and analysts will hold a discussion
Priority
Weight
Draft budget

Step 3
Publish to DREP and vote after further discussion

1 Like
23

FYI: CF’s financial reports:

https://ucarecdn.com/a8efed51-3bb9-46e9-aecb-9db64975c891/

Here is the breakdown of the Cardano Foundation’s annual activity costs for 2023 in English:

Total Annual Expenses

  • Total: $23.77 million

Expense Allocation

  1. Operational Resilience: $2.12 million

    • Implementation of real-time network monitoring
    • Testing of decentralized on-chain governance mechanisms
    • Support for the Valentine hard fork
    • Improvement of stake pool delegation strategy

  2. Education: $4.18 million

    • Establishment and registration start for the Cardano Academy
    • Engagement with regulators using the Cardano Explorer
    • Launch of the “Let’s talk Cardano” webinar series
    • Hosting of the Cardano Summit 2023

  3. Adoption: $12.92 million

    • Development of use cases to demonstrate the diverse applications of Cardano
    • Creation of services and APIs to support enterprise-grade Cardano applications
    • Initiation of auditable calculation of consensus rewards
    • Collaboration with the Georgian wine industry
    • Simplification of smart contract development through the introduction of the Aiken language
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24

Thanks for sharing. When can we expect or where is the financial report for 2024?

2 Likes
25

You’re welcome, happy to contribute :slightly_smiling_face:

26

Since we are now using gov.tools to vote on individual proposals being added to the budget, we’ve now got a 2 tiered budget system.

We have this existing budget, which no items have been submitted to gov.tools, so we are expected to vote yes or no to all of it.

I would expect that for all the reasons we now have a Catalyst style budget system for these new proposals, that we would use the same system across the board (but we don’t).

If transparency, accountability, and giving more power back to the DReps were realistically concerns, we would have the entire budget using this new system on gov.tools.

I appreciate all of the work that everyone has put in so far for the Cardano budget, and I know we still have a grind to go, but we will make it!

I personally think gov.tools needs streamlined tooling for ease of use if we expect DReps to sift through the amount of proposals and more that we now currently have. The UX is terrible for viewing multiple proposals, and there is no high level data aggregation which makes everything more difficult for DReps.

To help streamline things for all of us, I’ve made a budget spreadsheet with the data from the gov.tools budget proposals here:

[GAIA 2025 Gov.tools Budget Proposals - Google Sheets]

For some reason everyone can pick their rate of conversion for ADA to USD, which just makes a big mess of the numbers with variable conversion rates and has resulted in errors.

I’ve flagged all proposals in red that have incorrect ADA to USD conversion rates, and have also created a balanced conversion rate for all proposals at the same rate that the Intersect budget has been converted at ($0.50 USD).

Providing everything in the currently submitted budget passes, we would still come under Net Change Limit if it is decided that this should be 350,000,000 ADA.

We are looking at 265,387,604 ADA from the Intersect budget, and 62,916,370 ADA from these new budget submissions.

This would put us at 328,303,974 ADA , not including any new additions or any budget submissions by the CF or Emurgo.

I personally want to spend significantly less than 350 Million ADA, so I will be voting no on the majority of these new proposals.

I also think that the current Intersect budget still needs some cutting and further explaining, but this new budget process has been a great deflection to get eyes off of the existing Intersect budget :eyes:

2 Likes