Intersect is a member-based organization for the Cardano ecosystem

Intersect is a member-based organization for the Cardano ecosystem tasked with ensuring its continuity and future development. Bringing members together behind a shared vision, Intersect enables a more resilient, secure, transparent, and innovative Cardano ecosystem that puts members in the driving seat of Cardano’s future.

Intersect's five pillars
At its core, Intersect will focus on ensuring, through its members, the future maintenance and development of Cardano. As a community governed blockchain, this means caring about both the technology and processes that enable technical progress and consensus through discourse and collaboration.

Intersect has five pillars:

1. Support the community to develop the ecosystem by hosting developer-focused conferences, hackathons, and events.

2. Administrate and champion Cardano’s community-led governance implemented by CIP 1694.

3. Orchestrate delivery of the community approved Cardano Technical Roadmap.

4. Facilitate the continuity of Cardano for system stability.

5. Coordinate open source development of core technologies for Cardano.



What is Intersect

Intersect's Structure
Similar to municipalities, local councils, and other member-based organizations, Intersect has a governing board occupied and administered by its members, with various committees and working groups focused on specific domains and interests.

The design of Intersect’s governance and membership structure helps identify strategic priorities for Cardano’s development by having broad representation through a diverse global membership base. 

Incorporation
Intersect is incorporated in the United States Wyoming, as a Mutual Benefit Nonprofit organization in accordance with Wyoming’s state laws. Given the State’s warmness to innovation and new technology, specifically around blockchain and DAOs, it was the ideal jurisdiction to incorporate Intersect. 

Intersect was incorporated on July 13th, 2023.

Intersect's structure

The Governing Board
Intersect’s initial Governing Board comprises five member seats. To establish operations, three board members have been appointed with representatives from seed funders and members’ Input Output Global and EMURGO and the COO as interim on the third seat. The third seat has been offered as an academic position to Wyoming University’s Blockchain Center of Excellence. The seed funder seats have a three-year term in consideration of funding given, whilst the academic seat will have a one-year tenure.

The remaining two seats will be filled from Intersect’s membership, with elections to be held in the second half of 2024. Terms of these remaining seats are to be determined with the community as part of the election design.

Additional Board Members
The process to appoint the two remaining Governing Board members needs to be designed and launched in collaboration with members and in accordance with Intersect’s bylaws. To start, a new Advisory Board will be initiated and tasked with making this happen, and can also look at the process to establish wider committee elections. 

Governing Board Meetings
In 2024, the Governing Board will convene on a monthly basis, with the next board meeting scheduled for January 31st, 2024. Agenda and meeting minutes will be published in a timely manner.

Intersect Board Meetings details can be found here

Contacting the Governing Board
The Governing Board can be contacted via board@intersectmbo.org

Community advisory body working group
In January 2024, a community-led initiative to form a working group was established. The advisory body working group help to support and drive transparency at the governing board level, including observing board meetings. One of tenets of the working group is to ensure Intersect's legitimacy as member-based organization is achieved through listening and gathering the feedback from as much of the community as possible, and surfacing recommendations to the governing board. 

Intersect Professional Staff
Intersect is staffed by a team of experienced professionals with extensive exposure in the Cardano community. Later in Q1 2024, a new section on the website will highlight the staff behind the scenes, many of whom are already well-known in the community.



Intersect governance

Intersect supports the growth of decentralized and inclusive systems through technology and education, the administration of Cardano’s governance processes enabling technical changes, and advocacy. This can translate to internal operations and providing funding to develop Cardano’s open-source technology. 

To establish Intersect and provide sufficient capital to operate, Intersect has been seed funded by members Input Output Global and EMURGO. On the proviso that Intersect becomes a success in 2024, Intersect will seek funding for 2025 via a community vote from the Cardano Treasury or alternative sources. 

Funding Cardano & the DevTrust
Cardano has an underlying operational cost to keep the network running each year. This includes maintenance, upgrades and a variety of technical innovations to ensure Cardano continues to be current and a leading blockchain. Initially, for 2024, members Input Output Global and EMURGO have funded Cardano’s continuity. This funding enables a collection of members to continue supplying technical services to deliver the core operations. In Q1, Intersect will announce the scope of services these members have planned for 2024. 

To hold these initial operational funds, Intersect designed the Cardano Development Trust (DevTrust). This is a fund that’s mandated to only use its funds for the benefit of the Cardano Blockchain and the development of Cardano. The DevTrust acts as a vehicle to support and fund the continuity & vision contracts, and other commitments (such as grants). Intersect’s mandate is to administer the DevTrust to fulfil contractual agreements and earn service fees to support its operations.

Funding

Intersect values represents how our internal staff approach their work everyday, but also extends to all members at Intersect with how we interact and treat one another.

Empathy
Recognize the human capital among us all - supporting and understanding each other.

Understanding that if one thinks that something is good for them, that doesn't mean it is suitable for all. Do not assume. This means that we should consider the needs and perspectives of others, not just our own when making decisions.

Being mindful of starting conversations on a negative foot. Positivity breeds positivity.

Transparency
Being able to share your views openly.

Being able to understand the flow of the decision-making process.

Instead of building walls, bring a chair to the table.

Enabling decision-making power and decentralisation through being informed

Trust
Providing autonomy to others to make critical decisions.

Believing in the abilities and talents of others.

Being able to trust colleagues, trust yourself and trust the community.

Respect
Respecting the value in everyone’s opinion, even if it’s different to yours.

No one person has a monopoly on good ideas. Listen and be open minded to others.

Teamwork
Working as a team allows us to achieve better than the sum of our parts. We bring unique skills and perspectives that contribute to our collective success.

Understanding different perspectives and helping others where possible.

Knowing that we can do it together.

Knowing that when one needs help, they can ask.

Sharing the load and pulling in the same direction.

Accountability
Everyone takes responsibility for the work that they are doing.

Empowering others to do their best work.

Innovation
Working together to think of new and exciting ideas.

Listening and providing feedback for improvement and growth.

Professionalism
Utilizing the best of our knowledge and experience to deliver results.

Carrying ourselves with honor and pride at all times.

Diversity
Embracing a spirit that we all come from different walks of life and coming together to reach a common goal.

Determination
Striving for success to reach our goals as a team and company.

Our team united in embodying these values, is on a mission to build a better and stronger Cardano ecosystem. 

Intersect's values

Be part of the community taking an active role in the next generation of Cardano—and make positive change a reality.

Join as a Founding Member
As Intersect launches, join as a Founding Member today to:

Shape the future
Guide the strategic direction of Cardano by participating in steering groups, committees, and advisory boards. As a Founding Member, establish new committees and shape the future of Cardano’s governance. 

Develop and build
Access grants and work packages to continue to develop Cardano’s codebase and build the next generation of the blockchain. Help guide a comprehensive grant program with fellow members to support and enhance the protocol and ecosystem.

Strengthen your network
Collaborate with a diverse network of like-minded professionals dedicated to ushering in a brighter Cardano future. Work with other members to strengthen connections, foster new partnerships, and work together.

Elevate your profile
Showcase your contributions and successes in the Cardano ecosystem through member events, Cardano developer conferences, marketing, website presence, periodic reports highlights and much more.

Monthly Town Halls & an Annual Member Meeting
Intersect hosts monthly Town Halls where progress and committee updates are shared, and other news relating to events, community, and funding opportunities are presented. Check our Discord for more information.

In addition, Intersect members will be invited to attend and participate in an annual member meeting in the second half of 2024. The annual meeting will focus on Intersect’s activity and affairs, including voting on motions if applicable. Members will be able to participate both digitally and in person depending on the confirmed location. Details will be communicated to all members in the Spring of 2024. 

Intersect Membership Governance amendments
An Intersect Membership Governance amendment must include clear documentation highlighting the proposed changes.

An Intersect Membership Governance amendment may be executed by a Simple majority Board Decision.

Intersect membership

This page gives an overview of the Intersect membership tiers, their cost and the related benefits

Current Intersect Membership Tiers and Costs:
Enterprise Member - $1,000

Individual Member - $10

Associate - Free

Benefits
Voting rights


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Committees, Groups, and Boards

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Grants and Funding
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Other Benefits
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Marketing and Comms Benefits
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Membership tiers and benefits

Cardano’s Continuity and Vision
Continuity
Cardano “Continuity” is defined or referred to in the contracts as any approved technical services needed to build or fix current and future areas of the Cardano blockchain. Continuity in this definition can include new development, such as the CIP-1694 governance software, upgrades to components or improvements in testing. 

Building Cardano is a decentralized and distributed effort. During Q1 of 2024 Intersect has more than seven major Continuity contracts to deliver over 30 new functionalities and features to the blockchain. Continuity only focusses and builds the base infrastructure, there are many more community projects, dApps and initiatives being built on top.

Vision & backlog
Cardano's vision and backlog on the other hand, pertains to current development & new features and functionality that may be in the research phase or identified by members and the community to explore and develop. 

Open Source
Cardano is an open source project and has over 20 repositories that are maintained by Intersect and its members. Read more about Cardano's repository migration, and browse and engage with all the repositories directly here. 

Open Source Office (OSO)
The OSO is responsible for managing our open source program and community, and ensuring that we engage with the open source community in a transparent and effective manner. Navigate Cardano's open source approach, and the repositories 

Working on Cardano

This page explains how Intersect manage supplier contracts on behalf of the DevTrust

How do we manage contracts?

Intersect facilitates and administrates the management and oversight of all supplier contracts on behalf of DevTrust. This captures an extensive role in the facilitation, execution, and ongoing administration of contractual agreements between DevTrust and its suppliers. Intersect will actively engage in the negotiation process, ensuring that contractual terms align with DevTrust's objectives. 

Furthermore, Intersect will monitor the compliance and performance of suppliers, implementing necessary measures to uphold contractual obligations, optimize operational efficiency, and provide community transparency.

Delivery assurance function

Delivery assurance refers to the commitment & processes between continuity delivery partners to ensure the timely and reliable delivery of products, services, or projects - meeting specified requirements and expectations. It involves managing risks, monitoring progress, and implementing strategies for successful & punctual delivery. The methodology to gain assurance is flexible, depending on the length, complexity, and associated delivery risks.

Steered by the Technical Steering Committee (TSC), the Delivery assurance team is a core function at Intersect - completing tasks outlined above on behalf of the community. The team must execute its functions to ensure Cardano's continuity plan is delivered.

Managing delivery partners

Welcome to the Change Management Process for the Cardano Continuity contract managed by Intersect. This process ensures clarity on how changes can be introduced, providing certainty in our operations.

Scope of the Process:
This procedure applies to changes made to adjust direction, scope, or effort between Planning Increments (PI) or Statements of Work (SoWs). It also covers changes to policies and procedures affecting delivery under the Continuity work plan.

This process does not apply to the regular PI planning cycles nor to SoWs that have not yet been agreed, which agree scope and effort for an upcoming 3-month period.

Roles and Responsibilities:
Change Requestor: Identifies the need for change, completes the change form, and ensures implementation and reporting. This role can be fulfilled by anyone representing an organisation named within the contract subject to the change.

Change Manager: Manages change procedures, evaluates requests, and maintains records. A nominated person within Intersect’s Delivery Assurance Team.

Technical Steering Committee (TSC): Acts as the Change Advisory Board and evaluates requests.

Approver: TSC approves changes below the agreed threshold, while the Managing Director approves changes above.

Implementor: The Implementer is responsible for implementing the change.

Raising a New Change Request:
Discuss potential requests with involved parties before formally raising them, via email or the dedicated Delivery Assurance Slack channel.

Any party named within a contract can initiate a change request outside of the PI planning or SoW creation process.

Requests originating from third parties should be raised formally through the quality & feedback knowledge page for the TSC to take appropriate action.

The change requestor is responsible for completing the Change Request form.

Changes may be to scope of work, allocated effort, timelines or any other material change.

Formal recording of change requests via email to delivery@intersectmbo.org or during joint delivery assurance meetings and noted at the TSC.

 Approving a New Change Request:
Changes to policies and procedures will also be included within this process.  Where these have no material impact on the cost of delivery.

Changes in scope, effort, or cost implications are presented to the TSC for recommendation, prior to the change being agreed.

Final approval by Intersect's Managing Director (MD) for changes above set thresholds.

Recording & Communicating a Change Request:
Intersect, as the Change Manager maintains a formal change log and updates the risk register for approved changes.

For change requests that require MD sign off, the Change Manager will provide an update to the TSC.

For approved changes, impacted departments within Intersect are informed, and the community is notified via Gitbooks.

The Intersect Security Policy may supersede any change policy.

Cardano roadmap may be updated jointly by the Change Requestor & Manager to account for changes, and also account for new long-term work items. Roadmap items must be picked up from the roadmap via the regular planning process.

 Exceptions and Approval Thresholds:
Emergencies (e.g. an urgent security issue) may allow immediate action with subsequent urgent notification to Intersect.

Initial changes require approval from the Managing Director until formal thresholds are established at the AMM in October.

Change Management Process Overview

Intersect is designed to be steered by its members so the future of Cardano is community-led. The membership body provides this steering via standing committees. Standing committees are designed to be community-led, with community members taking an active role influencing the future of Cardano.

Intersect will initiate seven standing committees in 2024, covering the functional operations required to steer the delivery of "continuity", provide steering direction to the drafting of Cardano's constitution,  support the internal membership, and more.  A standing committee is expected to be a permanent fixture, although, changes may be required as the committees mature and the objectives evolve. The governing board will review proposed changes and support the membership.  

Working groups typically roll up into one of the seven committees. Working groups are, for the most part, temporary functions that support a committees' wider objectives or to expand expertise by seeking contributions from outside of Intersect. Working groups can be on any subject and are by nature less formal than standing committees.

You can an overview of the committee and their respective ways of working here. You can also find: 

Committee Maturity Standards

Committee Guiding Principles

Bi-Weekly Report for all Committees

Committee General Communications

Glossary of Terms

Current Committees at Intersect:
Civics committee
Membership and Community committee (MCC)
Technical Steering committee (TSC)
Parameter committee (PC)
Open Source committee (OSC)
Budget committee (proposed)
Roadmap committee (proposed)
2023 Interim Committee Report

Intersect committees

What is the Civics Committee?
The Civics Committee provide facilitation and oversight to the Cardano Community related to the governance of Cardano. This includes developing and facilitating processes to engage the Cardano Community in governance, coordinating with subject matter experts where needed, and providing support as requested by the Cardano Constitutional Committee.

Why is this committee important?
The Cardano Civics Committee ensures that Cardano's governance is accessible, fair, and transparent.

Which topics does this committee cover?
While not all of these topics are addressed yet, the vision is for the committee to cover topics such as:

Facilitate a ratification period for the constitution.

Enable and maintain the history of off-chain discussions about proposals.

Monitor tools for on-chain voting to verify that they are maintained and operational.

Update guidelines, templates, and standards for on-chain voting.

Providing non-binding recommendations as requested by the community regarding Cardano governance improvements.

How to join?
The Cardano Civics Committee will participate in Intersect committee elections to select the next cohort of members.

Extra info or links
More info about the committee and meeting notes can be found here

Civics committee

What is the Membership and Community Committee?
The Membership and Community Committee (MCC) fosters a thriving Cardano community through effective Intersect membership sales, account management, community support, tooling grants, education, and engaging events.

Why is this committee important?
It devises strategies to engage community members, promote collaboration, and encourage meaningful contributions. By organizing events, forums, and online platforms, the committee creates spaces for interaction and knowledge-sharing among community participants.

Which topics does this committee cover?
The MCC oversees membership within Intersect and, by doing so, ensures that each member has access to benefits and opportunities for fuller participation in Cardano’s growth and development. The MCC also reviews, accepts or rejects proposals for community Working Groups.

How to join?
Send an email to membership-and-community-committee@intersectmbo.org  for inquiries or more information. The MCC will be holding committee elections at the start of H2 in collaboration with the other Committees (Civics, Open Source, etc) to fill its 10-seat committee. The MCC hosts public meetings every four weeks for all members of Intersect to join.

Extra info or links
More info about the committee and meeting notes can be found here

MCC Terms of Reference (ToR)

Membership and Community committee (MCC)

What is the Technical Steering Committee?
The Technical Steering Committee ensures that the governance of Cardano is based upon sound technical awareness and best practices. 

Why is this committee important?
The committee is a rallying point for key members, suppliers, and third parties to coordinate the delivery of development services to support the Cardano blockchain. The committee facilitates contract arrangements and service level agreements, creates proposals of technical concern, reviews, and evaluates proposals prepared by the Cardano community, such as parameter updates or hard forks. 

Which topics does this committee cover?
Takes a leading role in defining and advising on Cardano Continuity development to support the Cardano network, including contracts and agreements with Intersect members. It’s a highly technocratic committee, providing deep technical analysis and advice to ongoing development projects, parameters settings (through the Parameter Committee), and any other network related conditions.

Extra info or links
More info about the committee and its working groups can be found here.

Technical Steering committee (TSC)

What is the Parameter Committee?
The Parameter Committee is a TSC subcommittee that ensures the Cardano protocol parameters are set based on sound technical awareness and best practices. This subcommittee includes four working groups:

Economic Parameters Advisory Group

Network Parameters Advisory Group

Technical Parameters Advisory Group

Governance Parameters Advisory Group

Why is this committee important?
The purpose of this committee is to provide technical advice and recommendations relating to updating protocol parameters, taking into account economic, security, network, and other technical considerations as appropriate to protect the long-term sustainability of the Cardano blockchain.

Which topics does this committee cover?
The committee meets every three weeks to discuss all Cardano protocol parameters, including network, technical, and economic parameters, providing technical advice and recommendations based on updated parameter settings. They also consider community proposals to update parameters.

How to join?
As this is a highly technical subcommittee, members can only join at the invitation of current members. 

Anybody can submit Parameter Change Proposals (PCP) on the Cardano Forum to request a technical recommendation from the committee.

Committee members participate in monthly SPO Calls to provide updates and answer questions from the SPO community.

Extra info or links
More info about the committee and meeting notes can be found here

Parameter Committee updates on Cardano Forum can be found here

Parameter Committee parameter change proposals on Cardano Forum can be found here

Parameter committee (PC)

What is the Open Source Committee?
The Open Source Committee generates an Open Source strategy for Cardano to follow. Advise on and promote Open-source activities across the ecosystem.   Be a rally point for members to get advice on building in an open-source environment

Why is this committee important?
The committee acts as a rallying point for members to get advice on building in an open-source environment. 

Which topics does this committee cover?
Define Open Source for Cardano.

Owns Cardano’s ongoing Open Source Strategy.

Oversees the start of Cardano’s Open Source Pilot.

Establish OS Practice for GovTool repos or the “Core Cardano” repo list.

This process will establish the procedure for all future hosted Intersect projects.

This also enables a best practice guide for other interested projects within broader Cardano.

How to join?
The  Open Source Committee is held publicly every Friday at 8-9 am PST every week. This call is open to everyone. If time permits, there is an open-ended questions section at the end of each meeting.

Members can also participate in the Discord thread #open-source-committee under Intersect’s Discord page.

Extra info or links
More info about the committee and meeting notes can be found here

The OSC has approved its governance policy found here

We also have a voting procedure PR that can be reviewed here drafted by a community member who just joined the OSC:
https://github.com/IntersectMBO/documentation/pull/2

Open Source committee (OSC)

What is the Budget committee?
The Budget committee will collate all costs for operating core Cardano and prepare an operating budget for review and approval by the community on an annual basis. The Budget committee aims to provide insight and transparency to the underlying costs to core Cardano. 

The Budget committee will be provided an approved list of items on the shared backlog by the Backlog committee (currently proposed). The Budget committee’s remit is to calculate an appropriate budget to assign to backlog scope items and manage a process to have a budget approved by the community. With on-chain consent, the budget will be funded by the Cardano treasury.

The first Cardano budget will be presented ahead of the Annual Members Meeting (AMM) for community review. Intersect members will vote on the budget at the AMM, with on-chain ratification following.



Budget committee (proposed)

What is the Roadmap committee?
We originally designed a Vision committee for Intersect as our 7th committee with the remit to manage visionary scope and roadmap for future development items. 

We now see that we need a committee to manage a variety of different types of Cardano development scope and establish a roadmap. In this way, Vision could then become a category of the scope where other categories of scope can be Continuity (maintenance, upgrades, and core development), features, or research. The scope may also include categories such as marketing, promotion, or other non-technical categories.

This naturally led us to consider that the artifact we need is a backlog to define scope and we need a backlog process to generate a pipeline for how the scope is community-reviewed and approved. Each item on the backlog will be approved with an expectation of a schedule, which will give us a roadmap. Hence, why we’re now considering that our 7th committee should be a Roadmap committee rather than the original Vision committee. 

A working group is formed to generate the definitions of scope items, scope categories in a shared Cardano backlog and to design the process to have the scope items reviewed and ultimately approved for funding.

The proposed Roadmap committee will provide the approved list of items on the shared backlog to a Budget committee. The Budget committee’s remit is to calculate an appropriate budget to assign to backlog scope items and manage a process to have a budget approved by the community to be paid out of the Treasury. 

All of the above is a draft in design with many questions to be answered. Intersect acting in the role of servant-leader is facilitating and coordinating the Core Infrastructure Roadmap working group to figure out these answers. 

The Core Infrastructure Roadmap working group may decide to change its name befitting its purpose. Whatever name is decided upon on a working group level will also change the name at the committee level. As the working group matures we do expect it to be promoted to become a committee-level group due to its importance.
[https://intersect.gitbook.io/backlog-committee/working-group/ecosystem-process-design-working-group](url)

Roadmap committee (proposed)

Working Groups
Working Groups are aligned to an Intersect Committee and their purpose.  

Working Groups are:

Aligned to and overseen by a Committee,

Informal and open

Short-term 

Focused around a defined purpose 

Have an agreed output.  

Any Member can request to be part of a Working Group, you can contact them through their discord channel.

If you have a proposal for a working group we recommend engaging with the committee you feel this aligns with in the first instance, if you are unsure you can start by forming a Special Interest Group and attending Committee meetings.

Please don't hesitate to contact the committee or the Committee Liaison if you have any questions.  

Special Interest Groups
Intersect Special Interest Groups are a newer concept within Intersect.  

Special Interest Groups are:

Groups of members who are all interested in a specific subject.  

Informal and open 

Formed around the subject of interest and 

Not time-bound.  

Able to convert to being a Working Group if appropriate.

Aligned to a committee / function if their subject aligns with a committee purpose 

Anyone can request to be part of a Special Interest Group, you can contact them through their discord channel.    

A link to form a Special Interest Group can be found here. 

Technical / Product Working Groups
Technical Working Groups which are aligned to Cardano Infrastructure development, they were previously also known as Product Working Groups.  

Technical  Working Groups are:

Defined by the scope of the development they have been commissioned to deliver

Different in time length as this will depend on their development delivery and these timescales are confirmed with the Delivery Assurance Technical Steering Committee or Open Source Committee. 

Have agreed and formalized milestones / key deliveries

More formal in nature as they have been "commissioned" to deliver a technical development. 

More information and a list of Working Groups can be found in the Intersect Committees & Groups space

Intersect groups (working & special interest)

Welcome to the Development Updates Archive!

Here, you'll find a comprehensive record of all our development updates, neatly organized by month. Each month's updates are accessible through a convenient drop-down menu, allowing you to find and review our progress and changes quickly. Whether you're looking for specific improvements, new features, or historical progress, our categorized archive makes it easy to stay informed and up-to-date with all our development activities. 
[https://www.intersectmbo.org/join](url)

Intersect development updates

Cardano's governance structure is made up of three areas of interest:

On-chain decision making (best described in the specification, CIP-1694)

A Cardano Constitution

Institutions (such as the member-based organization, Intersect)

Each area delivers complementary features to the others and are intertwined to drive better outcomes both on and off chain.

On-chain Decision Making
Cardano Improvement Proposal-1694 (CIP-1694) describes a governance system to bring decision making for the Cardano network on-chain. It seeks to advance the current governance system ensuring every ada holder has a voice in Cardano’s governance.

There are three key governing bodies with roles on-chain to secure consent on proposals submitted by the community (otherwise known as governance actions). The three roles played by stakeholders are:

Delegate Representatives (DReps)

Constitutional Committee (CC)

Stake Pool Operators (SPOs)

Depending on the type of governance action, a combination of the three roles above will vote to either accept or reject a proposal.

The Cardano Constitution
Interim
In Q2 2024, the Interim Cardano Constitution will be published for community review and included in the genesis files when the community approves Chang Update #1. The Interim Constitution is not a fully elaborated constitution, but rather a set of essential rules that are designed to ensure Cardano maintains stability during the interim period that Cardano’s governance will go through during 2024. The Interim Constitution will be interpreted by the Interim Constitutional Committee who will vote on the constitutionality of governance actions (as described in CIP-1694).

Draft
Later in Q2 of 2024, the drafting process will begin with the aim to move towards a final version ratified later in the year. The draft will serve as the primary input to global community workshops throughout 2024. With community input, the Draft Constitution may build upon the essential guardrails described in the Interim into a more holistic set of principles and rules.  

Final
The final version of the constitution will be both ratified at a constitutional convention composed of community delegates, and voted on by ada holders and ratified using the on-chain mechanisms described in democratic consent. The final version of the constitution will, like the draft, set forth principles and rules for Cardano, but will be the version suggested by the community through a year long consultation process 

Institutions
Institutions create the spaces and structures for the ecosystem to ideate, deliberate and recommend changes to the Cardano network. They can be informal collectives and alliances such as the many working groups formed by the community since Cardano launched, to newer larger organizations such as Intersect. In the example of Intersect, it will not only develop into a rallying point for community discussion, but will also work towards maintaining Cardano’s open source repositories and product backlogs.

Institutions support the feedback loop to ultimately drive better outcomes on-chain for the wider benefit of the Cardano ecosystem. 

Looking Ahead
With these three overarching governance features, the ecosystem will have the foundation of a governance system that can be observed and refined over time by the ecosystem itself. The age of Voltaire has only just begun.



Cardano's governance - three defining pillars

What is the Cardano constitution?
The Cardano constitution is designed to be the founding document that brings together the community’s wishes and discussions and puts them into text as a set of rules and principles to abide by to maintain the sustainability of the Cardano network. 

It outlines all the governance mechanisms, institutions, governance bodies, and responsibilities of all the various governance stakeholders in the Cardano ecosystem such as delegate representatives (DReps), stake pool operators (SPOs), and more.

The Cardano constitution is the cornerstone that will guide and serve as an anchor to all the other processes and developments Cardano will need to provide a sustainable technological platform for Web3 products and services. 

Currently, an interim constitution is in place to keep the blockchain safe and secure during the transition phase of 2024, crafted by the Cardano civics committee and external experts. A global consultation process is now underway to engage the rest of the community into the drafting of the final constitution. This consultation takes the form of a series of global workshops taking place, where hosts will bring together community members to feed into the drafting of the final document.

Stages to get to the final Cardano constitution

![](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1051122644591841321/1275477995452235818/image.png?ex=66c608f3&is=66c4b773&hm=ddf0c4f5d0ecd951928065f9df873d954ce63b2102e178c44d4f46c7dabe2121&=&format=webp&quality=lossless&width=893&height=795)


What is the role of Intersect in supporting the Cardano constitution?
Intersect is responsible for facilitating the overall Cardano Governance which also includes creation of the Cardano constitution, in its interim, draft, and final states. Furthermore, Intersect facilitates and supports the Constitutional Committee and at the moment Intersect (via its members) is one of the interim Constitutional Committee members.


Cardano Constituion

This interim constitution provides the basic rules needed to implement CIP-1694. It's temporary and will be replaced by a final constitution, which Ada holders will ratify in late 2024 or early 2025. The final version may be quite different, depending on what the Cardano community wants.

With these guardrails in place, the interim Constitutional Committee will focus on the technicality and base constitutionality of the very first community-submitted on-chain governance actions, upholding the interim constitution.
Read the interim constitution
The Constitutional Committee Portal (considered the single source of truth):

https://constitution.gov.tools/en

For rendered document please see: 

https://bit.ly/3VBj09T

Raw version

https://bit.ly/3RFE9yx

Interim Constitution

To support the constitutional workshops with foundational material and make the interim constitution accessible to the wider community Intersect has provided a grant to support the translation of the interim constitution in key suggested languages. These translations will be produced by community members and checked in the constitutional workshops.

More details about the grant can be found here.

For the interim constitution In Italian, please see here.

For the interim constitution in Japanese, please see here.

For the interim constitution In Italian, please see here.

Please check back for French, Swahili, Spanish, and Portugese.

Translated Interim Constitution

The Chang upgrade marks a significant milestone for Cardano this year, as it puts the community at the forefront of blockchain governance.  Following the Chang upgrade, the Interim Constitution will be on-chain and in effect until the community ratifies another constitution.  The Interim Constitution is intended to be minimal and temporary, allowing for the Chang upgrade to proceed by fulfilling the requirement of CIP-1694 to have a Cardano Constitution.  The Interim Constitution therefore allows time for the community to converge on a more holistic constitution for Cardano.

The Cardano Constitution Consultation period span all of 2024, summarised in the roadmap:

![](https://docs.intersectmbo.org/~gitbook/image?url=https%3A%2F%2F844111662-files.gitbook.io%2F%7E%2Ffiles%2Fv0%2Fb%2Fgitbook-x-prod.appspot.com%2Fo%2Fspaces%252Fo50OuflyxfUMOt8hHPn2%252Fuploads%252FAI12APMNDZWd0ksPTVJu%252FTimeline%2520%281%29.jpg%3Falt%3Dmedia%26token%3D726c2fdb-db2d-419b-bef5-0db2231a9008&width=400&dpr=3&quality=100&sign=f3145c8d&sv=1)

The first half of 2024 included work across Intersect committees and staff to prepare for the latter half of 2024 where broad community engagement is taking place. The Cardano Civics Committee and Parameters Committee have collaborated to prepare the Interim Constitution for the Change upgrade.  The Cardano Civics Committee, working with several relevant experts, have evaluated the Interim Constitution to identify areas for improvement, and develop a draft Constitution that align with Cardano’s vision for a decentralised, inclusive, and transparent governance structure.  The Draft Constitution serves as critical input for the Constitutional Workshops.

Starting in August and ending by Oct 15th, the Constitutional Workshops are series of community hosted workshops designed with two objectives:

Gather broad and diverse community input on the Draft Constitution.

Select Constitutional Delegates to attend the Constitutional Convention in Buenos Aires in Dec. 2024. Each workshop will select a ranked list of 5 candidates. First place is the Voting Delegate, 2nd place is the Travelling Alternate, 3rd place is the Backup Alternate #1, 4th place is the Backup Alternate #2, and 5th place is the Backup Alternate #3.

Each constitutional workshop is designed to address specific outstanding questions related to the Draft constitution.  Through structured discussions and interactive sessions, attendees will respond to important questions that cannot be resolved without broad community input. These workshops will develop actionable recommendations that will be synthesised across 50+ workshops to guide updates to the Draft Constitution. Constitutional Delegates will be responsible for reviewing the updated draft at the Constitutional Convention to approve to proceed for on-chain voting.


To read the Draft Constitution, please download here:
[https://844111662-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2Fo50OuflyxfUMOt8hHPn2%2Fuploads%2FmOkR77gKHcr9aZWl5FOX%2FCardano%20Draft%20V-3%20Final%20Constitution.pdf?alt=media&token=131556c0-923a-473f-9091-47f1ec8f11f0](url)

Draft Constitution

The roadmap to creating a lasting Cardano constitution
Beginnings: CIP-1694 
In November 2022, a new on-chain governance system was presented to the community for consideration (see CIP-1694). In the past 18 months, this CIP has become the most actively engaged CIP in Cardano's history. This proposal describes a governance system that creates on-chain governance for the Cardano blockchain. And while it lays out the technical specification for on-chain governance, it does not define the necessary off-chain aspects of governance.

Notably, it does not define a governing document for the social layer managing the blockchain, the Cardano Constitution.

Our First Governing Document: Interim Cardano Constitution
The first Cardano Constitution will be the Interim Constitution. This will be in place as part of the interim phase of on-chain governance (learn more here), to enable the Chang Upgrade. 

The next step in the process of developing  the Cardano Constitution is to host Constitutional Workshops around the world to solicit feedback from members of the Cardano community at large. This feedback will feed into the Constitutional Convention for approval by Constitutional Delegates.  Following the Constitutional Convention and successful on-chain ratification of the Cardano Constitution produced at that event, the new Constitution will replace the Interim Constitution.

Contributing to the final constitution via constitutional workshops
Intersect, in close collaboration with members and steered by the Cardano Civics Committee, will support and facilitate the consultation period leading up to the on-chain ratification of the final constitution in early 2025.

To support the consultation period, the Cardano Civics Committee will contribute by;

Providing input on a new draft Cardano constitution, and

Defining the process for Constitutional Workshops to select Constitutional Delegates and Alternate Delegates to attend the Cardano Constitutional Convention in Buenos Aires in December 2024.

![](https://docs.intersectmbo.org/~gitbook/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Flh7-us.googleusercontent.com%2FlmwjXihkHRnRfFkvZI3n9Fysf0rwB91OJj1yH-4g5leh7vaLQV0tlPQJqNHD7udQsLB0ddorLIx163Ep_xqEYgkhDsUsOPoZzQJaJudPLON2NxG3emMfqTUols4gb4mKh8mKokwdiQbVcwN7nX-lOYc&width=400&dpr=3&quality=100&sign=86bd7ff2&sv=1)

The global constitutional workshops are a keystone of the constitutional journey in 2024. To capture a diverse set of perspectives from the Cardano ecosystem, Intersect will support community hosts to facilitate and coordinate workshops around the world in geographically distinct regions. Intersect will provide constitutional workshop hosts who are members with a one-time grant to facilitate hosting a live event experience in their community - ensuring Cardano's final constitution meets the diverse needs of our global community.



Drafting the Constitution - Constitutional Workshops

![](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/980490396356476938/1275480950243065906/image.png?ex=66c60bb3&is=66c4ba33&hm=fa3b9d817f1a91eb6c3ef5bb0995b8a309a8d388911ccf89e575a35b45477d43&=&format=webp&quality=lossless&width=865&height=795)


![](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/980490396356476938/1275481103586562159/image.png?ex=66c60bd8&is=66c4ba58&hm=4097c4862df6957e7ce5b3bf0aadb4a486bc0e7b1ba9576c21121f9adc73e39e&=&format=webp&quality=lossless&width=618&height=794)


![](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/980490396356476938/1275481274143739958/image.png?ex=66c60c01&is=66c4ba81&hm=da19cb6a6290edadfc489fc97a8e75060d5505f8104e269112dc54f571f6cf67&=&format=webp&quality=lossless&width=1252&height=605)

Constitutional Workshop -Glossary

Introducing the interim Constitution Committee
Like the interim Constitution, there is an interim Constitutional Committee (CC) to enable the first stage of the Chang upgrade. The interim CC focuses on the technicality and base constitutionality of the very first community-submitted on-chain governance actions. Through the technical aptitude and expertise required to interpret the interim constitution and to submit CC votes, the interim CC fulfills an important role in maintaining the Cardano blockchain’s stability and security during the interim period.

Held in checks and balances through the governance design described in CIP-1694, the interim CC is bound by the thresholds and safeguards put upon it, and has a limited scope while the final constitution continues to be drafted through its consultation period.

Composition and remit of the interim CC
The interim CC initially comprises of seven members, all on a 73-epoch (one-year) term from the date of the Chang upgrade. As a result of the technical focus relating to the interim Constitution, the interim CC is composed of the pioneer entities: Input Output Global, the Cardano Foundation and EMURGO. To ensure broad community representation and diversity on the interim CC, Intersect holds the fourth seat.

The three remaining seats are elected from the Cardano community. The interim CC will strive to conduct itself within a set of guiding principles:

Uphold the interim Constitution - the primary and most fundamental principle of the interim CC is to uphold the interim Cardano Constitution. The interim Constitution provides the framework and guardrails for collective decision making. The interim CC, above all else, must fulfill its role to ensure the Constitution is upheld when making any decision.

Must be an ada holder - to ensure the interim CC member is a member of the Cardano community, as well as to enable participation in on-chain voting, every CC member must be an ada holder.

Transparent deliberation - Cardano’s on-chain governance model, as specified in CIP-1694, provides a foundation of open and transparent governance processes. The interim CC, and its individual members, will consider how it deliberates and makes decisions with transparency in mind.

Regular communication - the interim CC is expected to meet regularly to review and evaluate the constitutionality of each governance action, confer on technical guidance and analysis and, with Intersect’s administrative support, take minutes to be published publicly.

Publish rationale - when accepting or rejecting a proposal, the interim CC may publish in writing a rationale for decisions made, justifying the reasons why a particular governance action is or is not constitutional.

Stay informed - the interim CC (and the individual members) should stay abreast of important issues impacting on the network.

Interim CC members are not remunerated; however a support package via an administrative function at Intersect will help cover such expenses as for administration, communications, technical and legal support, and education and training.


The Interim Constitution Committee Election
The ICC election saw 455, 779, 792, 149, 846 (455, 779, 792 ada) staked and 1947 unique votes. We are pleased to announce the outcome, and confirm the remaining three seats on Cardano’s interim Constitutional Committee.

Note: Data provided by Summon Platform, a blockchain development group contracted by Summon MBO. Ada totals reflect voting results after a series of simple run-off elections where the candidate with the lowest number of votes was eliminated, until only six candidates remained. For more information on the ranked choice voting process used in this election please see the FAQs provided by the Summon Platform. 

Full audits can be viewed below:

[https://844111662-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-x-prod.appspot.com/o/spaces%2Fo50OuflyxfUMOt8hHPn2%2Fuploads%2FPKUgb2hPBCTo41dPNgRF%2Fccelectionvote_data_anon.csv?alt=media&token=96cf26de-8777-4ea8-81b6-a43e539c5f6d](url)


We are delighted to announce the 3 members appointed to the committee along with the pioneer entities are:

1. Cardano Atlantic Council
Adam Dean, Beatrice Anihiri, Mike Hornan, Jennifer Brito, Thiago Nunes, Richard McCracken

2.Cardano Japan
Seira Yun, Hix, Shusuke Wakuda, Rena Oishi, Hideki Takeshi

3. Eastern Cardano Council
Jo Allum, Mark Byers, Oscar Hong, Phil Lewis, Ha Nguyen, Yuki Oishi

4. Input Output Global
5. the Cardano Foundation
6. EMURGO
7. Intersect
Our sincere congratulations to the Cardano Atlantic Council, Cardano Japan, and Eastern Cardano Council who have been elected by the community as their top three preferred candidates. In addition, congratulations to Mauro Agustín Andreoli, Scientific Analytical Tools LLC, and Joshua Stone who are confirmed as alternates in the event one (or more) from the top 3 decline to sit on the ICC.

For those who missed out, we hope you will continue to play your part in the ongoing governance journey - find out more about how to be involved below.



Interim Constitution Committee (CC)

Do I have to be an Intersect member to register?
No, the process is open to any individual or organization from the Cardano community.

Will candidates be screened after registering?
Yes. Candidates will be required to answer a short set of questions to confirm technical competency to serve on the interim CC and a screening process will remove obvious junk applications.

What roles will the pioneer entities and Intersect play on the committee? 
It is for each interim CC member individually to decide how to perform its role, within the remit of the committee.

How else can I get my voice heard?
There are many ways to have your say on the development of Cardano’s governance:

Join Intersect, and contribute through community-focused committees, and working groups, including groups involved in creating a constitution draft that feeds into a broad community consultation process leading up to ratification.

Continue to test governance features on SanchoNet

Find out how you can attend one of 50 global workshops to input on the draft Constitution here.

Apply for funding opportunities at Intersect to support the rollout through community tooling and other community initiatives.

Interim CC FAQs

- Both applications to the interim CC and voting will be open to anyone from the Cardano community
 
- Registered candidates will be required to answer a short set of questions as well as provide DRep ID from SanchoNet to confirm basic technical competency
 
- Voting will be stake-weighted based on ada stake at snapshot taken at the boundary of epoch 490 on 8 June
 
- Ranked choice voting will allow voters to choose their top three candidates plus three alternates
 
- Results will be presented back to the Civics Committee to verify the outcome
 

Candidate considerations
Technical proficiency in and knowledge of Cardano’s network, economy, security, and governance parameters (as detailed in the upcoming interim Constitution guardrails).

Supporting the above, familiarity with Cardano's governance system including the inter-dependencies and relationships between actors (DReps and SPOs for example).

Proficiency in using Cardano node, command line interface and other related tools.

A commitment to following best practice and meeting the highest security standards in handling cryptographic keys within the Cardano ecosystem, such as using the X.509 certificate standard, including key generation, storage, and rotation best practices.

Previous experience in a decision-making role within a blockchain or decentralized governance setting (such as a DAO).

Degree(s) and/or relevant professional experience in Law, Political Science, Computer Science or a related field.

Recognizable and long-term Cardano community member - a person or entity whose incentives are shaped by a long-term interest in Cardano, such that there is no plausible conflict of interest. The majority of engaged Cardano stakeholders would see this entity as having a long-term and beneficial role in the community.

Sound judgement - competence and wisdom in dealing with challenges technical, strategic, and generally as complex as those that will be a feature of this role.

A good grasp of marketing and communications principles.

Social responsibility - competence and responsibility to make decisions that will impact on the entire Cardano community.

BONUS - knowledge of constitutional law theory, hierarchy of norms and conflict of laws. 



Process specifications

Introducing the Constitutional Council of lntersect
As part of our commitment to administering and championing Cardano’s community-led governance, Intersect’s seat on the interim CC will comprise 10 Intersect members, with majority votes determining Intersect’s vote on the constitutionality of governance actions. This body will be known as the “Intersect Constitutional Council'' and is guided in its operations by a draft Charter. The Council’s first task will be to refine and finalize the draft Charter before all members are expected to sign and thereafter act in accordance with its principles.

Intersect staff will support the Council by providing a permanent Secretary to lighten the administrative burden, and a senior observer of meetings; neither individual will have voting rights, or participate in debate or discourse. During the bootstrapping phase it is expected that the Council will convene weekly, with ongoing meetings called by the Chair and agreed by the Council.

Meet the Intersect Constitutional Council
We are delighted to announce the 10 members appointed to the council:

1. Adam Rusch
2. Eystein Magnus Hansen
3. Hosky
4. Jose Miguel De Gambo
5. Mercy Fordwoo
6. Mauro Agustin Andreoli
7. Ubio Obu
8. Ian Hartwell
9. Juan Sierra
10. Nicodemus Rodriguez 

Constitutional Council of Intersect

Intersect's position on the ICC and our Charter 
Abstract
Intersect was incorporated in Wyoming, USA, on December 8 2023, as a not-for-profit, members-based organization. Intersect’s mandate is to advance Cardano’s open development through our members, including management of Cardano’s core repositories and associated open source projects. Intersect also orchestrates and coordinates Cardano’s technical roadmap (including continuity) and supports and facilitates the bootstrapping and rollout of Cardano’s governance program. 

Intersect’s position on the Interim Constitutional Committee (ICC) as one member of a 7 member body, is an unelected seat during the interim period (max. term 73 epochs from the first stage of the Chang upgrade taking effect on mainnet). Once Cardano has exited the bootstrapping phase, ada holders will be able to replace the ICC via  on-chain governance action. The membership body will decide whether Intersect should stand for election to the Constitutional Committee when the ICC term ends in the summer of 2025.

Given Intersect’s constitutional role, its seat on the ICC will be distinct from day-to-day operations, committees, and working groups. During the interim period, Intersect’s seat will be referred to as the  ‘Intersect Constitutional Council’ (henceforth, ‘Council’).

Drafting the Charter
The new Council's first order of business will be to confirm the suggested provisions and motivations, and approve a final version of the Charter, with all Council members of the Council signing it. Intersect’s leadership team will sign the final Charter, along with the Council. Once finalized and signed by all parties, the Charter will undergo a legal review  to ensure relevant regulatory compliance. Once signed, all signees will confirm to uphold the Charter in good faith. 

The final Charter is expected to evolve and be amended frequently during the interim period as the Council matures and improves its operational capability. The core principles and tenets will remain largely unchanged, however. A change process is described in section 7.

This Charter will specify Intersect’s early principles and approach to how it will operationalize its ICC seat. It will describe processes, ways of working, membership conditions, and Intersect’s service to the Cardano community. The Charter will also detail the safeguards and dispute resolution procedures in place.

Charter principles 

Membership composition & commitment

Decision making, administrative processes, and ways-of-working

Key management, custody, and security arrangements

Conflicts of interest and dispute resolution

Role of Intersect’s staff 

Charter change process & versioning

Some clauses and terms may occasionally overlap with other sections. For the sake of completeness, there may be instances of duplication.

Definitions
Full Council includes Full Members and Alternates

Full Members are individual Intersect members either representing themselves or their organization, depending on the membership tier, on Intersect’s Council. 

Alternates are considered members of the Council without voting rights unless called upon to temporarily replace a full member due to a conflict of interest, resignations, inactivity, or voting deadlock.  

1 - Core principles
1.1 The Council agrees to uphold the interim Constitution and adjudicate on all governance actions based on their constitutionality. 

1.2 The Charter and its provisions will be upheld in good faith at all times.

1.2 The Council and its decisions will be transparent and made available to the Cardano community within a reasonable time frame.

1.3 The Council will be composed of Intersect members, subject to 1.31. 

1.31 Individual Council members cannot be represented elsewhere on the ICC, either individually or via their organization. For example, the Council cannot have representatives from the 3 pioneer entities (Cardano Foundation, EMURGO, and IOG) or be part of an elected consortium since they are already represented on the ICC. 

1.4 The Council will serve its term in accordance with limits given to Intersect’s seat on the ICC (notwithstanding arbitration options described in the dispute resolution section, nor the on-chain checks and balances as described in CIP-1694).

1.5 The Council may abstain from voting on governance actions that may wholly or partially benefit Intersect. There are many permutations to beneficiaries of decisions, and Intersect’s staff will assist in clarifying the conflicts of interest register. 

1.6 Governance actions that wholly or partially benefit a member/s of the Council will require a conflict of interest declaration, and impacted members may abstain from serving on the Council until a decision is reached. The Council’s Chair will call for a motion to either proceed acknowledging conflicts and/or Alternates will step in to maintain quorum or abstain entirely.

2 - Membership composition, oath, and commitment
2.1 All Council members must be paid-up members of Intersect (either as an individual or as an employee of an enterprise member) and maintain a level of ‘good standing’ as defined in the membership agreement. 

2.2 Council members can be individuals or represent their organization. However, all members must be named individuals and membership is non-transferable.

2.3 The Council (at least in the interim phase) will comprise seven full members and three alternates. Alternates will replace full members in the case of prolonged absence, conflicts of interest, resignations, motion to remove a member, or voting deadlock. Alternates will be invited to all meetings and will participate in full, with no voting rights unless called by the Chair to replace a full member.

2.4 The Council shall select a Chair from the full members. The Chair will rotate every three months and have limited scope, but will include tie-break powers in the case of a voting deadlock, represent the Council in dispute resolutions, and be able to call meetings among other areas as described throughout this Charter.

2.5 All Council members (Full and Alternates) are expected to be active, and will be considered inactive if they are absent for three meetings in any three month period. Inactivity can trigger clause 5.4.

2.6 Members may resign by giving four weeks written notice to the Chair. The resignation will trigger a by-election process to elevate one Alternate. 

2.7 All members will sign a conflict of interest register (besides this Charter) before accepting their role. 

2.8 All members are treated as equals, and will be afforded the same opportunity to share their position on a governance action, process, or procedural subject. 

2.9 All members agree not to be an ‘open or public’ DRep (ie openly accepting delegations) whilst serving in their role.

3 - Decision making, administrative processes, and ways of working
3.1 The seven members of the Council will reach a decision by simple majority vote, requiring a minimum 3-2 (quorum is 5) to vote yay, nay, or abstain pertaining to the constitutionality of a governance action. 

3.2 To reach a decision, it’s expected the Council will seek technical, legal, and other external sources of information. This can include, but may not be limited to, the technical, parameter, and civic committees within Intersect.

3.3 If abstentions result in a voting deadlock, all three alternates will be called forward to vote. In the event of a tie (5:5), the Chair will have the casting vote. 

3.4 Upon reaching a decision, the Chair will formally instruct Intersect to vote in accordance with the Council’s wishes (see more under ‘key management’). 

3.5 The Council will initially convene on a weekly basis during the bootstrapping phase. With Council approval, the Chair can alter this depending on governance action volume or for procedural reasons.

3.6 In special circumstances, the Chair can convene a special meeting by giving at least 48 hours notice to the Council. Also, the Chair will inform the Council if a full ICC meeting is called by other members of the ICC.

3.7 The Council will commit to publishing the rationale within 72 hours of a decision being reached, including the meeting recording of that decision being made.

3.8 The Council Chair will be invited to executive committee meetings for holistic awareness to technical and governance outputs from across Intersect. 

3.9 The Council is currently an unpaid body, but it is anticipated remuneration will be a discussion point for the Council in collaboration with Intersect professional staff.

3.10 An appointed Secretary will keep pace with the flow of information on-chain, including governance action submissions and expiry dates, ensuring the Council understands critical timelines in which to reach a decision.

4 - Credential  management and security arrangements
4.1 During the interim period, Intersect’s Constitutional Committee credentials will be in the legal custody of Intersect and fully managed by Intersect staff (subject to clause 4.3). 

4.2 Intersect’s credential configuration will support multiple roles within a larger system, allowing for separation of capabilities between different roles/individuals. Using a robust multi-signature authorization scheme for on-chain governance transactions, Intersect will leverage best key management practice. See reference point. 

4.3 Intersect staff, including the board and executive team, have no authority to use the keys without formal instruction from the Council. For security purposes, key holders will remain confidential.

5 - Conflicts of interest and dispute resolution 
5.1 All members will be required to declare conflicts of interest before joining the Council. The Secretary will maintain an up-to-date log at every meeting. 

5.2 The Chair can propose the removal of a Council member. This requires a supermajority (6:3) decision by the Council. This decision should specify the alleged Charter breach/es (inactivity, for example), Intersect’s Code of Conduct, and/or Intersect’s membership agreement. 

5.41 Once verified by Intersect’s governing board, the offending member will be notified and an Alternate will fill the vacancy. Similarly to a member resigning, this will trigger a by-election to select a new Alternate.

5.3 The Council can be dissolved if a petition by the Intersect membership base is presented to the governing board with at least 51% of the membership signing. 

5.31 Once verified, the governing board and executive team will dissolve the Council in its current state and assume responsibility for fulfilling Intersect’s role on the ICC. However, the election process to elect a new Council must commence no later than 14 days after the dissolution. This clause does not at any time supersede the on-chain safeguards to submit a no-confidence vote.

5.4 Upon receiving formal instruction from the Council, if the agreed decision is not carried out in accordance with the Council’s wishes, a formal investigation will immediately commence, including the option for disciplinary action against named individuals. This may include sanctions such as suspension and dismissal. 

5.5 If Intersect ceases to exist as a legal entity or winding down notices are submitted, the Council will be notified and dissolved with immediate effect. Intersect professional staff will resign from the ICC by submitting the relevant transaction to take effect on-chain.

6 - Role of Intersect and its staff
6.1 Under Intersect’s second pillar - administrate and champion Cardano’s community-led governance implemented by CIP-1694 - Intersect and its staff will remain neutral and at all times act as servant-leaders to the Council and Intersect’s membership base. 

6.2 To support the Council, Intersect will appoint a permanent Secretary, allowing all members to fulfill their role to the best of their ability without too heavy a burden on administrative tasks. Also, technical and communication resources will be available to the Council when required.

6.3 A senior member of Intersect’s staff will act in an observer capacity at all formal governance action meetings, but will not participate in debate or discourse. The Council may call upon the named individual to clarify a procedural question or request an action, but said individual shall remain impartial and objective at all times. 

6.4 Intersect’s leadership, including the executive team and governing board, will have no authority or responsibility over decisions taken by the Council, and will only act under formal instruction to vote in accordance with the Council’s wishes. 

7 - Charter change process and versioning
7.1 This charter will be regularly reviewed for adherence and accuracy once in effect. It must be reviewed at least every three months during the interim period, after which it is expected to be reviewed annually if the membership agrees to stand for election in 2025. 

7.2 This charter can be amended at any time, but requires all Council members (including alternates) to be present, approving with a super-majority threshold (7:3). All Council members  (including Intersect leadership) will be required to re-sign their commitment to upholding the charter within 72 hours of any new version coming into effect.

7.3 The Secretary of the Council will maintain all records.

Intersect Constitutional Council Charter

What is the Intersect Constitutional Council?
Intersect’s position on the interim Constitutional Committee as one member of a ten member body, is an unelected seat during the interim period. Intersect’s role on the interim Constitution Committee will be separated from day-to-day operations, committees and working groups, and in the interim period will be referred to as the “Intersect Constitutional Council”. The Council will be made up of ten Intersect members, with an Intersect-provided secretary and senior observer in supporting roles.

Who sits on the Council?
Members of the Council can be individual Intersect members or represent their organization. However, all members of the Council must be named individuals and membership on behalf of an organization is non-transferable between individuals.

The Council (at least in the interim phase) will comprise seven full members and three alternates. Alternates will replace full members in the case of prolonged absence, conflict of interest or voting deadlock. Alternates will be invited to all meetings and will participate in full, bar voting rights unless called to replace a full member.

How will the Council vote on governance actions?
The Council will reach a decision by simple majority vote, requiring a minimum 3-2 (quorum is 5) to vote yay, nay, or abstain pertaining to the constitutionality of a governance action. 

Upon reaching a decision, the Chair will formally instruct the nominated Intersect staff member to instruct the key holders to vote in accordance with the Council’s wishes.

When does the Intersect Constitution Council take effect?
Intersect’s Constitutional Council will be announced on July 5th. Training will take place during the week of July 15th. 

The full interim Constitution Committee will be operational on mainnet from the date of the first stage of the Chang upgrade (known as Chang 1) taking effect on mainnet.

What does Intersect seat on the Interim Constitutional Committee (ICC) mean?
Intersect’s position on the ICC as one member of the seven member body, is an unelected seat during the interim period (a maximum term of 73 epochs from the date of the Chang upgrade taking effect on mainnet). The membership will decide whether Intersect should stand for election to the full Constitutional Committee in the summer of 2025.

Given Intersect’s constitutional role, its seat on the ICC will be distinct from day-to-day operations, committees, and working groups - forming a new group tasked with operationalizing Intersect’s interim CC seat.

How else can I get my voice heard?
There are many ways to have your say on the development of Cardano’s governance:

Contribute via community-focused committees, and working groups, including groups involved in creating a constitution draft that feeds into a broad community consultation process leading up to ratification.

Continue to test governance features on SanchoNet

Find out how you can attend one of 50 global workshops to input on the draft Constitution here.

Apply for funding opportunities at Intersect to support the rollout through community tooling and other community initiatives.

Intersect Constitutional Council FAQs

Decentralised Governance Requires different actors to function properly.
These are the 4 key one described in CIP-1694:

General ada holders

Ada is Cardano’s native currency, named after Ada Lovelace, the English mathematician and programmer. ada has six decimal places and these fractions of ada are called lovelaces. They can be thought of as cents to a dollar.

ada can be used to pay transaction fees on the Cardano network and can also be delegated as stake to a stake pool, helping to secure the Cardano blockchain. Delegating ada allows the user to receive rewards for doing so. All rewards are distributed in ada every 5 days, i.e. every epoch. As a community member, your ada stake also gives you the right to participate in on-chain voting.

As described in CIP-1694, ada holders can:

Delegate their voting power to DReps

Become a DRep (to represent themselves or others)

Submit on-chain governance actions

Review on-chain governance actions


                                     Delegated Representatives (DReps)

Delegated Representatives (DReps) are a new role introduced in the Age of Voltaire as part of the governance model proposed under CIP-1694. DReps, stake pool operators, and the Constitutional Committee are responsible for voting on governance actions. Any ada holder can register as a DRep.

DReps will play a crucial role in the decision-making process within the Cardano ecosystem, contributing to the democratic nature of the governance model. Ada holders may delegate their ada voting power to representatives who they feel are best equipped (for example, through deeper technological expertise) to best represent their interests.

                                        Stake Pool Operators (SPOs)

A person or organization that takes responsibility for setting up and keeping the pool running. This usually entails owning or renting a server, holding the key to the pool, and maintaining and monitoring the node.

As described in CIP-1694, SPOs can:

Submit governance actions

Review and submit votes on active governance actions


                                                Constitutional Committee

The Constitutional Committee (CC) is one of the three groups responsible for ratifying governance actions under CIP-1694 alongside SPOs and DReps. CIP-1694 defines the CC as a committee that represents a set of individuals or entities that are collectively responsible for ensuring that the Constitution's principles are upheld and enforced.

The CC reviews, under a limited scope, the constitutionality of governance actions. The CC are a formal group sitting outside of Intersect and fulfils their role independently.






Governance roles

A truly decentralized blockchain protocol must embrace a governance model that fosters collaboration and democratic consent every step of the way. Alongside alignment around core principles, processes, organizations and mechanisms, effective governance requires tools to promote community engagement and provide the technical ‘plumbing’ for building consensus across the Cardano ecosystem.

Voltaire’s developmental roadmap has prioritized governance tooling in an effort to create greater efficiencies and provide new avenues for community involvement in promoting Cardano’s ongoing advancement. 

Open source
Governance tooling is owned and maintained by the community. With community approval, Intersect, through its committees and working groups, will play an important role in hosting and maintaining these governance tools. Through active community involvement, the aim is to create the initial foundation layer together with different builders in the community. These governance tools support and enrich the processes that are necessary to fully implement CIP-1694 on-chain voting. 

Once this foundation layer is ready, the community will be able to further contribute to these governance tools by maintaining and improving existing features and pillars, creating new features or completely new areas either by themselves or supported by awards and grants facilitated by Intersect.

Grants
Soon enough, the community will have a number of new tools at its disposal for engaging in participatory governance actions on the Cardano blockchain and will have an even greater ability to easily and effectively shape and improve the protocol through collective decision making as Cardano enters the age of Voltaire.

Read more about funding opportunities at Intersect 



Governance tools

Overview of the Voltaire Govtool

The Voltaire Govtool is a community tool that supports the key steps of Cardano's Governance process described in CIP1694. Govtool is part of the core governance tools.

Intersect has facilitated the bootstrapping of GovTool and supported the process to fully open source it, allowing community ownership for improvement and maintenance.

The Voltaire Govtool, together with the other core tools such as the Constitutional Committee Portal, is currently managed by the Intersect Governance tools WG, the three existing pillars that make Govtool (Proposal Discussion, Delegation, and Voting) are developed and maintained by the WeDeliver Team, the Byron team and tested by the DQuadrand team.

The four pillars of Govtool
The Voltaire Govtool architecture is divided into pillars, allowing the different maintainers to work with minimal dependencies on their respective applications while giving the end user one cohesive experience. This structure also allows for easier individual contribution and for easier expansion of these tools. Furthermore, because Govtool is fully open source, anyone can create their own version of Govtool, either the whole Govtool or just a pillar, making it better and then providing value back to the core tool.

![](https://docs.intersectmbo.org/~gitbook/image?url=https%3A%2F%2F844111662-files.gitbook.io%2F%7E%2Ffiles%2Fv0%2Fb%2Fgitbook-x-prod.appspot.com%2Fo%2Fspaces%252Fo50OuflyxfUMOt8hHPn2%252Fuploads%252FUbytj3ciKS4VWNBrIqPg%252FScreenshot%25202024-08-08%2520at%252020.34.02.png%3Falt%3Dmedia%26token%3D64b3ad22-4ca1-4977-8211-b8da59b11340&width=400&dpr=3&quality=100&sign=31007710&sv=1)

                                                        SanchoNet Govtool
In its first implementation, Govtool has been connected to the SanchoNet testnet allowing ADA holders to test the full governance features. The community can participate in testing on sanchogov.tools, keep track of participation in the participation dashboard, and track of development and feedback in the github project.

In its current implementation, SanchoNet Govtool has the following features:

Proposal discussion

DRep registration

DRep delegation

Including delegation to Abstain and No-confidence

Reviewing and Voting on active Governance Actions

Voltaire GovTool

Overview of the Constitutional Committee Portal

The Constitutional Committee Portal (CC Portal) is part of the core governance tools, supporting the key steps of the Cardano governance process.

The CC Portal is a community tool that have been developed via an Intersect grant.

The CC Portal, together with the other core tools such as the Voltaire Govtool, is currently managed by the Intersect Governance tools WG, and it is developed and maintained by the Bloxico team.

Key features
The CC Portal provides access to a user-friendly version of the Cardano Constitution (as of now the Interim one), provides the Constitutional Committee members an easy interface to create the metadata to attach as rationale to the votes they submit on-chain, and provides context about Constitutional Committee members votes to Cardano community.

Constitutional Committee Portal

The governance described in CIP-1694 does describe some key on-chain steps. Around those key steps there are off-chain processes that support the on-chain steps.

Here is a list of defined and suggested steps and processes related to the Cardano Governance proposed in CIP-1694.

Governance process

Off-chain proposal submission and discussion is a governance process that should happen off-chain, before a governance action gets submitted on-chain for voting.

During this step proposers should socialise context about their proposal (what later on might get submitted as an On-Chain Governance Action), to explain the rationale behind their proposal, provide supporting evidence of its validity and usefulness, generally provide extra context and more. 

Once socialize the Cardano Community is expected to review this content to provide comment and feedback that will allow the proposer to improve and adjust the proposal itself and also get a feeling about community sentiment around it, before it gets submitted as an On-Chain Governance Action.

Why it is important?
Off-Chain proposal submission is a critical step of the overall Governance process. It does allow proposers to provide clear and complete context, as well as supportive material, about their future Governance Actions, and so it allows the overall community to participate in the refinement of the proposal, making use of its shared brain, one of the great strength of a distributed community to handle a decentralised governance process.

Off-Chain proposals also generate the valuable context that will then been submitted On-Chain with the Governance Action in the form of metadata. This will then be available On-Chain (and displayed in Governance Tools) for voters to make an inform decision when submitting their vote.

Furthermore, as described also in CIP-1694, a structured Off-Chain process can reduce and filter the amount of Governance Actions that get submitted On-Chain, reducing the stress to the blockchain itself.

It's important so to consider that without a structured and complete Off-Chain proposal submission and discussion process the Governance Process itself could fail because there would be no clear avenue for discussing and refining ideas, Governance Actions submitted On-Chain would simply be  a basic view of a single or small group people, without any structured context for voters to make a decision on.

Suggested Off-chain Process for Proposal Submission
The suggested key steps for this Off-Chain process are:

Proposal submission in a dedicated platform owned and maintained by the community

Community discussion on the submitted proposal (potentially with a defined minimum length)

One or more ways for proposers to gauge the sentiment of the community around their proposal before On-Chain Submission as a Governance Action (for example using submitted community comments, reactions or via an Off-Chain poll)

Proposal editing, meaning the ability for proposers to adjust their proposal based on the feedback received by the community 



Off-chain proposal submission and discussion

On-Chain Governance Action submission is the process of submitting one of the 7 Governance Actions On-Chain for the voting bodies (DReps, SPOs, Constitutional Committee) to vote on.

Governance Actions can be submitted On-Chain through the Cardano CLI and in the future through a simple user interface in GovTool.

What are the key steps
Before submitting a Governance Action on chain it will be recommended to have a period of Off-Chain socialisation

On-chain Governance Action Submission

Depending on the Governance Action type different content needs to be provided in the request (link to cip)

Optional metadata can be added to enrich the context around the Governance Action

On-chain governance action submission

To submit a governance action to the Cardano CLi please follow this guide on Sancho.network 

https://sancho.network/tutorials/actions

How to submit a governance action through the CLI

On-Chain DRep registration is the process that allows ADA holders to register themselves as Delegated Representatives, giving them the ability to represent themselves or others when voting on active On-Chain Governance Actions.

This step also allows ADA Holders that register as DReps to add optional Metadata to the registration. The suggested use for this is to add extra context useful for other ADA holders to make a decision about delegation.

On-Chain DRep registration can be  performed through the Cardano CLI and through the Voltaire GovTool.



On-chain DRep registration

On-Chain DRep delegation is the process that allows ADA Holders to delegate their own voting power to existing Delegated Representatives (DReps) allow them to vote on their behalf on active Governance Actions.

In order to delegate to the right DRep it will be likely that ADA Holder will need to have visibility about the Metadata that DReps have submitted during registration (the extra supportive context). This extra context might include their expertise, interests, past voting history and more. 

On-Chain DRep delegation can be  performed through the Cardano CLI and through the Voltaire GovTool.



On-chain DRep delegation

On-Chain Voting is the process that allows the 3 voting bodies (DReps, SPOs, Constitutional Committee) to submit their decision about On-Chain active Governance Actions, and so allows the Cardano Community and its ADA Holders to be represented in the Governance of Cardano.

In order for a Governance Action to get ratified through On-Chain voting it needs to meet voting thresholds from some or all of the voting bodies (depending on the Governance Action Type).

✓ Can Vote on that Governance Action Type

✕ Cannot Vote on that Governance Action Type

![](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/980490396356476938/1275487209247604746/image.png?ex=66c61188&is=66c4c008&hm=861e6d7a4a5b5b225e138ec52d93225864d6ba35975b8965b12b6391d93a14e3&=&format=webp&quality=lossless&width=1098&height=795)

On-chain voting

A Governance Action gets approved (or ratified) if it reaches the defined thresholds. 

       Governance action enactment
A Governance Action gets implemented (or enacted) after it has been ratified through on-chain voting. Ratified actions are then enacted on-chain, following a set of well-defined rules.

Note: Enactment for Info actions is a null action, since they do not have any effect on the protocol.

Governance action ratification

Governance Action outcomes should be socialised in an Off-Chain process after they get ratified or expire.

This should be true for all Governance Actions, regardless of their outcome, and even more for those important Governance Actions that get ratified and will be enacted.

Why it is important?
The Governance process is a linear one, which start with Off-Chain community discussion and should end with the outcome. It is so important to close that loop by sharing the outcome of the On-Chain vote Off-Chain, preferably where the process started (so where the original Off-Chain Proposal was submitted)

Governance Actions Outcome
To support this critical step of the Governance Process Intersect will issue a grant to build a new part of Govtool. More information about this grant will be shared when the grant opens.

Off-chain governance action outcome socialisation

Goals of the Program
Intersect would like to sponsor a DRep Pioneer Program by inviting selected members to deliver the course to the Cardano community as Pioneer Workshop Leaders.

By the end of the program, a significant part of the community will be equipped with the knowledge and skills needed to effectively participate in the new governance role - DRep.

A major goal of this initiative is to develop a continuous learning program that will support the first cohort of DReps’ to be able to effectively perform their role in Cardano’s proposed governance design.

A further goal of the program is to create materials that can be used ‘standalone’ independent from the training courses, so that a potential DRep can train themselves on what is required in an intuitive and clear way.

Expectations
Since this initiative holds significant importance for the Cardano community, we anticipate Pioneer Workshop Leaders to collaborate closely, share resources and insights, and take ownership of their roles to decentralize this program effectively.

DRep Pioneering Program

Testing the technical features described in CIP-1694

SanchoNet is all about developing and testing the technical components and processes required to action governance for Cardano within CIP-1694. It informs and engages the Cardano community on Voltaire on-chain governance activities currently underway.

SanchoNet will evolve from a testnet into a collaborative platform where ideas become reality and contributions enrich the ecosystem, fostering fully decentralized decision making. You can read more and get involved here. 

SanchoNet

![](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/980490396356476938/1275488661458128933/image.png?ex=66c612e2&is=66c4c162&hm=3a26e365962e63ba5eb29764e7c6d62c0bd8d3a9b178a348c440d7beb05527ae&=&format=webp&quality=lossless&width=618&height=311)

Key terms

A Governance Action is a proposal that gets submitted On-Chain for voting. It is an on-chain event triggered by a transaction. Governance actions have an expiration period, after which the action cannot be enacted. 

Any ada holder can submit a governance action for a vote on-chain. Once the action is recorded on the ledger, voters submit voting transactions.

                                            GA - Motion of no-confidence
A motion to create a state of no-confidence in the current constitutional committee.

Note: a motion of no-confidence is an extreme measure that enables Ada holders to revoke the power that has been granted to the current constitutional committee.

                                               GA - New constitutional committee or Quorum size
Changes to the members of the constitutional committee and/or to its signature threshold and/or terms


                                            GA - Updates to Constitution
A modification to the off-chain Constitution, recorded as an on-chain hash of the text document

                       
                                        GA - Hard-Fork Initiation
Triggers a non-backwards compatible upgrade of the network; requires a prior software upgrade



                                       GA - Protocol Parameter Changes
Any change to one or more updatable protocol parameters, excluding changes to major protocol versions ("hard forks")



                                       GA - Treasury Withdrawals
Withdrawals from the treasury


                                     GA - Info
An action that has no effect on-chain, other than an on-chain record



Governance Action

Ratification refers to a Governance Action. A Governance Action gets approved (or ratified) if it reaches the defined thresholds. 

Governance actions are ratified through on-chain voting actions. While different kinds of governance actions have different requirements, ratification always involves two of the three governance bodies (DReps, Constitutional Committee and SPOs), with the exception of a hard-fork initiation, which requires ratification by all governance bodies. 

Depending on the type of governance action, an action will  be ratified when a combination of the following occurs:

the Constitutional Committee (CC) approves of the action (the number of 'Yes' votes meets the CC’s threshold)

the DReps approve of the action (the stake controlled by the DReps who vote 'Yes' meets a certain threshold of the total active voting stake)

the SPOs approve of the action (the stake controlled by the SPOs who vote 'Yes' meets a certain threshold over the total registered voting stake)


The ratification period is the time that elapses between a governance action being submitted and its ratification.

Ratification

Enactment refers to a Governance Action. A Governance Action gets implemented (or enacted) after it has been ratified through On-Chain Voting. Ratified actions are then enacted on-chain, following a set of well-defined rules.

Note: Enactment for Info actions is a null action, since they do not have any effect on the protocol.

Enactment

Threshold refers to a Governance Action. A threshold is the minimum amount of voting stake (from each of the voting bodies) that a Governance Action should reach to be ratified. Each Governance Action Type might have specific thresholds to meet. 



Threshold

In the CIP-1694 Governance Metadata refers to any Off-Chain extra data submitted On-Chain to provide extra context.

These include:

DRep Metadata:
These are optionally submitted during DRep registration and should allow DRep to provide more context about themselves.

Governance Actions Metadata:
These are optionally submitted during Governance Action submission and allow proposers to provide extra context about their Governance Action to the voters to allow them to make an informed decision.

Vote Metadata:
These are optionally submitted when any of the voting bodies (DReps, SPOs, Constitutional Committee Members) submit their vote to provide extra context about their decision. For Constitutionally Committee Members is mandatory to submit a rationale about their vote and so to submit metadata with their vote.

Note: When submitted On-Chain, Metadata will be made of a URL where a .JSONLD file is stored and a Hash of that URL. (More info can be found here in CIP-1694)

Currently the structure of these metadata is in progress of being defined by the community in CIP-100?

Metadata

The Chang upgrade, to be enabled by a hard fork combinator event in 2024, will apply the technical capabilities of CIP-1694’s on-chain governance onto mainnet. The upgrade is named in honor of Phil Chang, who sadly passed away in 2022. Phil was an early leader in Cardano governance at IOG, and his thinking contributed significantly to the early design of Voltaire. He understood that governance brings out the best and worst of the human condition, and always approached his work with the reverence and mindfulness that it demanded and deserved.

Chang upgrade

CIP-30 describes a web-based communication bridge allowing web pages and DApps to interface with Cardano wallets through injected JavaScript code.

This CIP defines how web pages and DApps access the injected code, and also defines the API for DApps to communicate with the user's wallet.


                                               CIP-95
CIP-95 is a proposal designed to empower ada holders with a voice by way of voting capabilities, using a standards-based approach to maximize wallet implementations and therefore enfranchisement. During a tooling hackathon event in Edinburgh, participants achieved a general consensus around prior Open Question decisions, ratifying the proposal’s base design.


                                                    CIP-1694
   CIP-1694 introduces a new on-chain governance model for Cardano. This CIP seeks to advance the current governance system, ensuring every ada holder has a voice in Cardano’s governance. 

The proposal outlines a tricameral model consisting of stake pool operators (SPOs), Delegated Representatives (DReps), and a Constitutional Committee (CC), each with distinct responsibilities and roles. 

The CIP-1694 proposal was merged into the main branch of the CIP GitHub repository on June 30, 2023, marking its transition to the “Proposed” status.
                              
                                              Constitutional Committee

The Constitutional Committee (CC) is one of the three groups responsible for ratifying governance actions under CIP-1694 alongside SPOs and DReps. CIP-1694 defines the CC as a committee that represents a set of individuals or entities that are collectively responsible for ensuring that the Constitution's principles are upheld and enforced.

As described in CIP-1694, each Constitutional Committee (CC) member has one vote, adhering to a “one member, one vote” principle. CC members are responsible for reviewing whether governance actions align with the Cardano constitution. The CC must meet a specific quorum defined by a protocol parameter to pass a governance action.

CC members may vote on any governance action and decide if it goes against the Constitution. The CC cannot modify governance actions once presented for a vote. The CC will be initially instituted for the first interaction with members of the Cardano community and evolve as the governance model advances.  


                                    Constitution

A constitution is a collection of rule sets that determine how laws are enacted, administered, and adjudicated in a given society. Throughout history, constitutions have played a key role in establishing and delineating a Government’s structural framework, defining the different branches and their respective powers and responsibilities. A constitution both provides the framework for collective decision making and typically incorporates design features that should reduce the costs of collective decision making at scale. As Cardano is a community-led ecosystem, it is imperative that its Constitution is enacted for the benefit and protection of the entire ecosystem. 

The Constitution will provide the framework and guardrails for collective decision making. It will also define the rights and principles for those participating in the Cardano ecosystem and provide the foundation to meet current and future demands that come with a maturing ecosystem.



                                                 SanchoNet

SanchoNet is the testnet for rolling out groundbreaking governance features for the Cardano blockchain, aligning with the comprehensive CIP-1694 specifications. SanchoNet is a vibrant, inclusive, and community-driven platform that stands apart from other testnets. Following a phased delivery roadmap, SanchoNet will expand to include a range of governance features, including submitting governance actions, while providing a valuable educational resource for users who want to learn more about how Cardano's governance system works. Every community member is invited to join SanchoNet and actively contribute to shaping Cardano's governance future.


CIP-30

The term hard fork describes a radical change in the blockchain: a change from one protocol to another, for example. In most blockchains, a hard fork indicates block changes or a change to their interpretation. Cardano initiates hard forks in a unique way, instead of implementing radical changes, through a hard fork combinator event, there is a smooth transition to a new protocol while saving the history of the previous blocks. Intersects role is to coordinate this activity on behalf of the community. This requires collaboration between Intersect members, users of Cardano, and suppliers and builders across the ecosystem.

Once a capable, updated node is available there are a series of required activities to test and promote into use and mainstream adoption, via a hard fork. These activities will be coordinated by the Hard Fork working group, which in turn reports into the Technical Steering Committee at Intersect.

To learn more about hard forks please read the Cardano Docs article, here. Further information, and an overview of the last major hard fork, Vasil, can also be found on here Cardano Docs and previous state-of-play updates.

How to get involved 
Regular updates will be provided to Intersect Members on the progress of hard fork related activity, followed by public updates. Progress will be updated through Intersects Committees, Working Groups and regular Intersect Development Updates, then through public updates on our usual channels.

Cardano hardforks and upgrades

The Chang upgrade is the culmination of many years of hard work, including all the community participation that has taken place through community workshops and testing on SanchoNet. This moment represents a significant step towards minimum viable on-chain governance as defined in CIP-1694. As stake pools upgrade their nodes to support the new protocol, Cardano will have moved into the Voltaire Era, creating a self-sustaining blockchain and trailblazing the way forward for the industry.

The first of two upgrades (Chang Upgrade #1) will deploy a set of governance features to Cardano and enter the technical bootstrapping phase as described in CIP-1694. 

The second upgrade (Chang Upgrade #2) moves CIP-1694 out of technical bootstrapping phase and unlocks the full features of CIP-1694 on-chain governance including full DRep participation and all types of governance action.

The upgrade honors Phil Chang, who sadly passed away in 2022. Phil was a pioneer in Cardano governance at IOG, and his thinking contributed significantly to Voltaire's conceptualization. As part of Voltaire, the Chang upgrade transitions the ledger into the Conway era, establishing decentralized decision-making foundations by implementing CIP-1694 on-chain governance mechanisms.

The Chang upgrade will follow a similar path to that of the Vasil upgrade. The final decision to hard fork will be made – in consultation with members of the SPO, DApp and community – against 3 key criteria:

No critical issues outstanding on node (including ledger, CLI, consensus, etc.) 

Benchmarking and performance-cost analysis is acceptable

Community (including exchanges and DApp projects) has been properly informed and has had sufficient time to prepare for the hard fork combinator event

Chang Upgrade

Intersect plays the role of coordinator, as a functional servant-leader on behalf of the community and delivery teams working on hard fork activity. The functional teams within Intersect will work with the various committees, working groups, and delivery teams, relaying information here on the knowledge base. Ultimately the date for the hard fork is directly influenced by the community fulfilling the requirements detailed below.

Chang Upgrade Release
The Chang upgrade will stagger the release of governance functionality, easing adoption and onboarding for those with new or additional roles in governance. 

Chang Upgrade #1 will deploy governance features to Cardano and enter the technical bootstrapping phase as described in CIP-1694 Bootstrapping Phase

Chang Upgrade #2 moves CIP-1694 out of technical bootstrapping phase and unlocks the final features of on-chain governance including DRep participation and all governance actions

Further information on CIP-1694 and the interim bootstrapping period is available.

                                          Chang Upgrade #1 Events
![](https://docs.intersectmbo.org/~gitbook/image?url=https%3A%2F%2F844111662-files.gitbook.io%2F%7E%2Ffiles%2Fv0%2Fb%2Fgitbook-x-prod.appspot.com%2Fo%2Fspaces%252Fo50OuflyxfUMOt8hHPn2%252Fuploads%252FrnzexfJTbvWo9FQuuhpR%252FChangStatus_6aug24_2.PNG%3Falt%3Dmedia%26token%3Db275b9b7-7603-48f4-b8fa-c035b3bfa4dc&width=400&dpr=3&quality=100&sign=846695f4&sv=1)


![](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/980490396356476938/1275493210373750878/image.png?ex=66c6171e&is=66c4c59e&hm=49859b06b8c55450ec5ecbdd729bfc5dfdaf67e3c93623ef5efa65d3b8e2d006&=&format=webp&quality=lossless&width=950&height=795)


![](https://docs.intersectmbo.org/~gitbook/image?url=https%3A%2F%2F844111662-files.gitbook.io%2F%7E%2Ffiles%2Fv0%2Fb%2Fgitbook-x-prod.appspot.com%2Fo%2Fspaces%252Fo50OuflyxfUMOt8hHPn2%252Fuploads%252FdmPccAVH1EQGPPCp80bX%252FChang%2520timeline.png%3Falt%3Dmedia%26token%3D7c407066-ffce-465f-b2bf-3e3a67579286&width=400&dpr=3&quality=100&sign=ae118d1c&sv=1)


Steps for Chang #2 upgrade will be mapped after completion of Chang #1 harfork.

Last Updated; 2024-08-15

Chang #1 Dependencies
 These are the dependencies, as agreed by the hard fork working group, which need to be completed or at a suitable point prior to initiating the hard for combinator event for the Chang upgrades. 


![](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/980490396356476938/1275493658610761811/image.png?ex=66c61789&is=66c4c609&hm=fea362a114f9fe123082ce4cbd923be9d02313b7017aec98e414dccb64f724cb&=&format=webp&quality=lossless&width=896&height=795)

Key Context
Node 9.0.0 vs Node 9.1.0
Node 9.0.0 contains all the new Conway functionality and is fully capable of full governance.

Node 9.0.0 will not be the final node version for Preview, PreProd or Mainnet, as it will not have the correct configuration files, known as genesis files.

The genesis files specify things like protocol parameters and importantly the credentials for the interim constitutional committee.

Splitting Node 9.0.0 and Node 9.1.0 allows users to test all the new Node code across networks before having the final genesis files prepared.

Cardano Environments
Preview: Acts as a preview for newer Node versions, can be unstable.

Pre-Production: Environment that matches mainnet configuration, long-term and stable environment for final-stage integration/upgrade testing. 

SanchoNet: An unstable temporary network for governance testing.

Mainnet: Our production environment – the actual network the Cardano community uses every day.

Bootstrapping vs Full Governance testing
The plan is to maintain SanchoNet in full governance mode.

While hardforking Preview Network into bootstrapping phase and keeping it there for the foreseeable

To give everyone a way to test full governance on Sancho whilst testing bootstrapping on Preview.

More information on the Major Release Process is also available. A frequently asked questions page and Ecosystem readiness page related to the Chang hard fork is also being updated on the knowledge base regularly. 




Chang #1 Dependencies & Timeline

This page gives an overview of the status and readiness for the Cardano Chang Upgrade #1

This page is updated frequently and is open to community feedback to ensure the correctness of reporting. 

Email hard-fork@intersectmbo.org if you spot any fixes.

👉 Key Update
By Stake, we have now reached 80% of SPOs on 9.1.0 - the hardfork Threshold for SPOs has been reached 🎉

By Liquidity,  we have now 28% of Exchanges on 9.1.0, with Hardfork Threshold at 85%

The next potential hardfork date is: 27nd August, 2024 🎉🎉

Be aware; Ledger Nano S device support for Conway is stalled, all other devices are supported.

![](https://docs.intersectmbo.org/~gitbook/image?url=https%3A%2F%2F844111662-files.gitbook.io%2F%7E%2Ffiles%2Fv0%2Fb%2Fgitbook-x-prod.appspot.com%2Fo%2Fspaces%252Fo50OuflyxfUMOt8hHPn2%252Fuploads%252FnUgd5Cc6m1kVxgfwBjqB%252FChang.19aug24.png%3Falt%3Dmedia%26token%3D296afc90-a283-4806-b3d9-3087e6a80565&width=400&dpr=3&quality=100&sign=989c7c97&sv=1)


Status
Ready > Ready for Chang #1 as signalled by the team

In Progress > Team are preparing for Node 9.X.X integration and Hardfork Working Group is aware of remaining tasks

Not Started > The work is not started but is criteria is understood

Blocked > Work is blocked

TBC > Unknown, status to be confirmed

Core Infrastructure Components
Core infrastructure encompasses all technologies included within the Cardano Node, as well as key tools.

High-level status: Ready

Name	Status 	Release
Ledger

Ready

Node 9.1.0

Consensus

Ready

Node 9.1.0

Network

Ready

Node 9.1.0

Plutus Core

Ready

Node 9.1.0

Cardano CLI

Ready

9.2.1.0

DB-Sync

Ready

DB-Sync 13.3.0.0

End to End Testing

Ready

Test Report

Performance and Tracing 

Ready

Test Report

Environments
Cardano has a range of network environments, and each will require a Hard Fork, below we compare the prevalence of Cardano blocks created by Node versions within the last 8 hours. 75%+ will indicate readiness for the Hard Fork to Conway ( Protocol 9.0)

High-level status: In Progress

Network	9.0.0 Blocks (%)	9.1.0 Blocks (%)	Ledger Era	Governance
MainNet

2%

80%

Babbage

N/A

PreProd

0.38%

63%

Babbage

N/A

Preview

9%

76%

Conway

Bootstrapping Phase

SanchoNet

100%

0% (will remain on 9.0.0)

Conway

Full (post-bootstrapping)

For live numbers please visit Cexplorer/versions

Total Stake Pools	Stake Pools Ready	Stake Ready %
3102

1012

80.65%

For the latest numbers please visit: cardanoscan

Section maintained by IOG Core Tech Team

Last Updated; 2024-08-19

Exchange Readiness
Exchange readiness is tracked against the top exchanges by ADA liquidity (as reported by Cexplorer/hfs).

High-level status: In Progress

Exchange	Status	Liquidity %
WhiteBIT

Ready

9.24%

FMFW.io

Ready

7.70%

Bitrue

Ready

3.99%

LBank

Ready

2.08%

Coinbase Exchange

Ready

3.09%

Bitfinex

Ready

0.77%

BitMart

Ready

0.53%

EXMO

Ready

0.36%

MEXC

Ready

0.24%

HitBTC

Ready

0.04%

WOO X

Ready

0.01%

Gate.io

Ready

2.29%

Poloniex

In Progress

9.98%

Bitget

In Progress

5.76%

Upbit

In Progress

4.67%

Binance

In Progress

4.1%

OKX

In Progress

2.67%

Kraken

In Progress

2.26%

KuCoin

In Progress

1.81%

Crypto.com

In Progress

1.59%

Paribu

In Progress

0.06%

CEX.IO

In Progress

0.01%

HTX

Not Started

10.85%

Changelly Pro

Not Started

6.45%

P2B

Not Started

4.33%

DigiFinex

Not Started

2.69%

AscendEX (BitMax)

Not Started

2.27%

For the latest info on Exchanges by Liquidity please visit: Cardanoscan (source) and Cexplorer.

Section maintained by Cardano Foundation

Last Updated; 2024-08-16

Tooling Readiness
Tooling readiness is tracked against Node 9.X.X compatible releases and reported by each team.

Low-Level Tooling
We define Low-Level Tooling, as tools which are required by higher-level tools, dApps, and wallets.

High-level status: In Progress

More details; Low-Level Tooling Chang Readiness Details

Libraries

Library	Status	Release Version
Cardano Serialization Library

In Progress

Pending (see releases page)

Cardano Multiplatform Library

Ready

5.3.0

Cardano JavaScript SDK

Ready

See releases page

Pallas

In Progress

Pending (see releases page)

Cardano Transaction Library

In Progress

Pending (see changelong)

Tools

Tools	Status 	Release Version
cardano-wallet

Ready

Pending (see releases page)

Rosetta

Ready

Rosetta 2.3.2 include node 9.1.0 (see releases page)

GraphQL

Ready

Pending (see releases page)

cntools (guild-operators)

In Progress

Pending (see branch)

SPO Scripts (@gitmachtl)

Ready

SPO Scripts for Node 9.0.0 (Mainnet)

Indexers

Indexers	Status	Version
Ogmios

Ready

v6.5.0

Oura

In Progress

Pending (see releases page)

Scrolls

In Progress

Pending (see releases page)

DB-Sync

Ready

DB-Sync 13.3.0.0

Carp

Ready

3.2.0

Higher Level Tooling
Tools	Status
Blockfrost

Ready

Maestro

In Progress

Koios

In Progress

Section maintained by Cardano Foundation

Last updated; 2024-08-12

Wallets Readiness
Wallet readiness is tracked against their integration against Cardano Node versions, as well as self-reported readiness.

High-level status: In Progress

Light Wallets
Wallet	Highlevel Status	Preview Network
Lace

Ready

Ready

Yoroi

Ready

Ready

Yoroi (Mobile)

Ready

Ready (no governance features)

Nufi

Ready

Ready (no governance features)

Eternl

Ready

Ready

Eternl (mobile)

Ready

Ready

Gero

Ready

In Progress

Gero Mobile

In Progress

In Progress

Vespr

In Progress

In Progress

Vespr (Mobile)

In Progress

In Progress

Nami

Ready (no governance features)

Ready (no governance features)

Flint

In Progress

In Progress

Flint (Mobile)

In Progress

In Progress

Begin

Ready

Ready

Typhon

In Progress

In Progress

Hardware Wallets
Wallet	Readiness
Trezor

Ready

Ledger (Nano S+, Nano X, Stax)

Ready

Ledger (Nano S)

In Progress (Unlikely to be ready for Chang #1)

Keystone

Ready

Full Node / CLI Wallets
Wallet	Readiness
Daedalus

In Progress

AdaLite

Ready

CNTools

Ready

Section maintained by the Wallets Working Group

Last updated; 2024-08-14

DApp Project Readiness
DApp readiness is tracked against self reported readiness, dApp developers do need to prepare as Conway will change costing around the use of reference scripts.

Please see Ref Script Cost Calculator from IOG Core Team.

High-level status: TBC

Project	Status
Charli3

Ready

Danogo

Ready

Axo

In Progress

Minswap

TBC

SundaeSwap

TBC

Wingriders

TBC

DexHunter

TBC

Axo

TBC

Optim

TBC

Spectrum

TBC

Splash

TBC

Genius Yield

TBC

Indigo

TBC

Liqwid (finance)

TBC

Djed

TBC

USDM

TBC

Levvy

TBC

Orcfax

TBC

Iagon

TBC

NMKR

TBC

Book.io

TBC

NEWM

TBC

Rosenbridge

TBC

MyUSD

TBC

Encoins

TBC

Clarity

TBC

Summon

TBC

JPG.Store

TBC

MuesliSwap

TBC

Lending Pond

TBC

Fluid Tokens

TBC

LenfiAada

TBC

VyFinance

TBC

ADAX Pro

TBC

Lenfi

TBC

Revuto

TBC

Artano

TBC

Section maintained by Anatasia Labs

Last updated; 2024-08-12

Supporting Governance Initiatives - Readiness
The Chang #1 hardfork will introduce governance to Cardano, specific tooling is being developed to support the governance model.

Governance Tooling
High-level status: In Progress

Tool	Status
GovTool

In Progress

Constitutional Committee Portal

In Progress

DRep Campaign Platform

In Progress

Section maintained by the Governance Tools Working Group

Last Updated; 2024-08-12

Interim Constitutional Committee Readiness
Interim Constitutional Committee readiness is tracked against training module completion as well as on-chain mainnet cold credential creation.

High-level status: Ready

Member	Readiness
Cardano Atlantic Council

Ready

Cardano Japan

Ready

Cardano Foundation

Ready

Eastern Cardano Council

Ready

Emurgo

Ready

Intersect

Ready

Input Output

Ready

Section maintained by IOG Voltaire Team

DRep Pioneer Program                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          
DRep Pioneer Program readiness is tracked against total number of participants who have gone through a DRep pioneer program workshop.
Learn more and get involved: DRep Pioneer Program Overview.

High-level status: Ready

Total DRep Training Completed	Status
50

Ready

75

Ready

100

Ready

150

Ready

300

Ready

Section maintained by Intersect DRep Pioneer Program lead

Last Updated; 2024-08-16

Community Readiness
Qualitative feedback and sentiment from key committees, hubs, and working groups on their readiness for the hard fork.

High-level status: In Progress

Area	Status
Hard Fork Working Group

In Progress

Parameters Committee

In Progress

Open Source Committee

In Progress

Membership and Community Committee

In Progress

Civics Committee

In Progress

Intersect Hubs

In Progress

Chang Upgrade #1 Readiness

The following information is intended to provide the community an indicative overview of the major release process, major releases include such events as hard forks. In blockchain technology a hard fork is one of the most significant upgrades. It is a radical change in a blockchain protocol that affects the validity of blocks and transactions on the decentralized network. 

The below provides an outline of the role different roles that Intersect committees, working groups and the community play in contributing to the major release process.

                                   Major release process

![](https://docs.intersectmbo.org/~gitbook/image?url=https%3A%2F%2F844111662-files.gitbook.io%2F%7E%2Ffiles%2Fv0%2Fb%2Fgitbook-x-prod.appspot.com%2Fo%2Fspaces%252Fo50OuflyxfUMOt8hHPn2%252Fuploads%252FJywroNcc03SaFLPF4CGT%252FMajor%2520Release%2520Process.gif%3Falt%3Dmedia%26token%3De9852671-7d27-48c4-ac92-4efcafb9b6f3&width=400&dpr=3&quality=100&sign=1d990488&sv=1)


1. Continuity suppliers contribute to building a feature ready node which is a candidate for a major release

![](https://docs.intersectmbo.org/~gitbook/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Flh7-us.googleusercontent.com%2F_pm-76XatL2iPHXSVhkovkyiNrCuKkbtZ8MIEANexJen4ux_w_Asj-v8zmi8It5vI1MhjJZ26rtmf72tY5WHhZ6xlYM7gh_sYyWQu3lbReyBBUGHAuPXIUFEu-kAPl6p4YTzlZV3asa5PxY%3Ds2048&width=400&dpr=3&quality=100&sign=c791e062&sv=1)

2. Intersect steers coordination of major release activity through the Technical Steering Committee and working groups

![](https://docs.intersectmbo.org/~gitbook/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Flh7-us.googleusercontent.com%2FyzoSoimOX6N_e7-V3EJN7Zxp8-hj6FyqPPv_cdgdsx6_RVd8IZW9QdTzmvgTF1B1rG-l-xACP1IcUdn8og1Joe9Fxq69vGnoALCR2VHLyZ5X4veHF8E8VLpkFsCAkBSRJ5u_qtdAYOVoTAI%3Ds2048&width=400&dpr=3&quality=100&sign=836013e6&sv=1)

Intersect coordinates major releases, such as a hard fork, through its community led Technical Steering Committee and associated working groups.  

Technical Steering Committee - ensures that governance of Cardano is based upon sound technical awareness and best practices. The committee is a rally point for key members, suppliers and third parties to coordinate delivery of development services to support the Cardano blockchain.

Intersect Hard Fork working group - the hard fork working group focuses on the details of the hard fork. They are made up of relevant experts in different technical areas to facilitate the coordination on behalf of the TSC.

3. Continuity suppliers prove quality

![](https://docs.intersectmbo.org/~gitbook/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Flh7-us.googleusercontent.com%2FkCbH6svXVvBYp6lvb3yiK0uYDovmKaArkuRMmAzGpsghJwluyvazFFOgpr4056pbk9WnA54H-U-RSEA5ZpP0io3CXpddNdp-nMJNHTKhRJfTrxhektyXx5-Bq4JmHix8DbblH3ysXKcSOTk%3Ds2048&width=400&dpr=3&quality=100&sign=ca8c3f18&sv=1)

Continuity suppliers play a key role in making sure that new updates and changes to our software are of the highest quality before they go live.  

Development - push via quality - the process starts in the development phase, where the main focus is on integrating quality right from the beginning. Instead of adding it later, quality is a priority from the start, which helps in building a more reliable and robust product.

Quality Reports -  once the development integrates quality measures, the next step involves detailed quality reports. These reports are generated to assess the performance and reliability of the new updates.

4. Testing conducted with SPOs, Exchanges and dApps


![](https://docs.intersectmbo.org/~gitbook/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Flh7-us.googleusercontent.com%2FXjMSqbrk9ihaN9tjEoWlKVTwAYei5vOzFYzXMtRGYHrQFUJ6EgxRkCP62Uds0q5qpzFnCeIBt6iwxSCwbvEFUQ7d2N74roYjh60qVzvxWoX8QY3xpam8KFGcN0rWrZRVFMm33bzCXh9m-x8%3Ds2048&width=400&dpr=3&quality=100&sign=e4e9b450&sv=1)

When preparing for major updates such as hard forks, community feedback and preparation is essential. Key members are invited to working groups, all of the community is encouraged to provide feedback. 



5. Feedback and major issues resolved by continuity suppliers

![](https://docs.intersectmbo.org/~gitbook/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Flh7-us.googleusercontent.com%2FRfnIhOTxQw2H9zHTfy_ciMGwKqHKaYgytNh_3BSW03ZwpoDlNLfP7OPuKMjsvB0tzMdwbkMFkXZApKPVJdJ-fF9EjRWa-xN-BdeMkgfYqzZHE20wT57dXTGTUNJbMyiGjGQ6nuS8IjeDKBg%3Ds2048&width=400&dpr=3&quality=100&sign=dfe9a8d3&sv=1)

Feedback and issues are iteratively collected, triaged, categorised and resolved by the appropriate continuity suppliers.


6. Community adoption

![](https://docs.intersectmbo.org/~gitbook/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Flh7-us.googleusercontent.com%2F5hgljC8H6wxZ6Iz2obmtSWC-vfItDHULIFrs9yA4FjWVQIbnBvKGm4AolPhPmNAggvkzjQVsr-qARZ0ImwvQTXQijEv3hh3PqV8HKZJMWhVA_ICeXCKDkO_YrPMLbJ8TeVjYJk4DD3tOfBs%3Ds2048&width=400&dpr=3&quality=100&sign=f5e20a54&sv=1)

Once satisfactory time has passed, allowing major exchanges, SPOs and DApps to contribute to the quality process outlined and no high severity issues remain, a hard fork combinator event can be initiated - pull of the community via adoption. 

A hard fork combinator event is a way to update a blockchain without splitting it into two separate paths. Unlike a regular hard fork, which usually creates a new branch of the blockchain and leaves the old one behind, a hard fork combinator blends multiple updates into one smooth process. This means the blockchain can introduce new features or rules without stopping the system or losing any of its history.

How this works?

For example, when the Cardano blockchain moved from the Byron system to the Shelley system in 2020, they used a hard fork combinator. This tool allowed them to keep all the old Byron information while starting to add new Shelley features. This gradual change helped everyone on the network move over to the new system smoothly, without having to switch all at once

We hope you find the above a useful, as an indicative summary of how the major release process works, and the part the community has to play in the process.

Major release process

Quality is a consistent benchmark with all upgrades no matter how big or small. To ensure we release and maintain secure and stable nodes and upgrades, we encourage the community to help with testing and providing feedback. This is especially important in the lead up to a major event, like a protocol version change (or hard fork).

We always actively encourage issues or bugs to be raised by our members, and the community more broadly towards those teams who are supporting the continuity of Cardano. 

To raise a ticket, simply log an appropriate ticket on GitHub under the 'cardano-node' repository at the following link:

https://github.com/IntersectMBO/cardano-node/issues/new/choose

A number of options are available, and select what you believe a best fit. All tickets will be triaged by a member of the joint technical teams and assigned a severity.

![](https://docs.intersectmbo.org/~gitbook/image?url=https%3A%2F%2F844111662-files.gitbook.io%2F%7E%2Ffiles%2Fv0%2Fb%2Fgitbook-x-prod.appspot.com%2Fo%2Fspaces%252Fo50OuflyxfUMOt8hHPn2%252Fuploads%252FxMyVfL5JgD9Is05jTXNz%252Fimage.png%3Falt%3Dmedia%26token%3Dacc17253-e9c8-41fa-bbc8-55be12f7a6bb&width=400&dpr=3&quality=100&sign=278ab628&sv=1)

Soon we hope to provide analytics, to track a wealth of health information associated with the repositories. As well as history and volume trending of issues and bugs, by a number of measures.



Quality and feedback

Cardano “Continuity” is defined or referred to in the contracts as any approved technical services needed to build or fix current and future areas of the Cardano blockchain. Continuity in this definition can include new development, such as the CIP-1694 governance software, upgrades to components or improvements in testing. 

In this space we will provide a regular update of what is being delivered under continuity, we will also provide an update of progress from the technical operations and delivery assurance team within Intersect. 

The delivery assurance team is one of the supportive, servant-leader, functional teams at Intersect. They support the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) in the operation and oversight of contracts which are in delivery. In Intersect, the delivery assurance team sits within the Technical Operations function at Intersect.

Delivery assurance
Delivery assurance function
Delivery assurance refers to the commitment & processes between Cardano Continuity Suppliers to ensure the timely and reliable delivery of products, services, or projects - meeting specified requirements and expectations, on behalf of the community. It involves managing risks, monitoring progress, and implementing strategies for successful & transparent delivery. 

Steered by the Technical Steering Committee (TSC), the Delivery assurance team is a core function at Intersect - completing tasks outlined above on behalf of the community. The team must execute its functions to ensure Cardano's continuity plan is delivered.

Key responsibilities
Risk Management: Identify and suggest potential mitigations for committee action.

Progress Monitoring: Track and ensure project schedules are met and communicated with the community.

Quality Assurance: Maintain and review quality standards for deliverables, on behalf of the community.

Stakeholder Communication: Provide regular updates and ensure clear communication to our Suppliers and Community members.

Issue Resolution: Address and resolve delivery obstacles quickly and transparently to ensure smooth progress and maintain trust within the community.

Flexibility in Methodology: Adapt strategies based on project and community needs and risks.

Support the TSC: Align delivery strategies with TSC directives and community goals.

Documentation and Reporting: Keep comprehensive records and prepare detailed reports, and ensure these are shared with the community.

Continuous Improvement: Refine processes based on feedback by the community and past projects.

Importance and impact
The Delivery Assurance function enhances reliability, fosters trust, and promotes transparency through regular communication. Aligned with the TSC, Delivery Assurance upholds strong governance and supports Cardano's continuity and growth by improving efficiency and ensuring strategic goals are met, ultimately benefiting the entire Cardano community.

Cardano continuity

Who are our continuity suppliers?
Bitergia, DQuadrant, Emurgo, Galois, Input Output Global (IOI), Tweag, VacuumLabs, Well-Typed

![](https://docs.intersectmbo.org/~gitbook/image?url=https%3A%2F%2F844111662-files.gitbook.io%2F%7E%2Ffiles%2Fv0%2Fb%2Fgitbook-x-prod.appspot.com%2Fo%2Fspaces%252Fo50OuflyxfUMOt8hHPn2%252Fuploads%252FyeukFvZS8Z4mnVDf2hMd%252FSuppliers.png%3Falt%3Dmedia%26token%3D2f7aea29-6998-4a97-995f-f8745bb1d477&width=400&dpr=3&quality=100&sign=7e73d104&sv=1)

Contract management
Our contract management process involves careful planning, monitoring, and evaluation to ensure all obligations are met and projects are completed on time and within budget, on behalf of the community.

What work are our cardano continuity suppliers doing?
Current projects

Bloxico
To facilitate Cardano’s age of Voltaire, Intersect develops multiple web app-based tools to enable users to engage with important Voltaire user journeys. This includes GovTool, Proposal Discussion Forum, DRep campaign platform, and the Constitutional Committee Portal. Bloxico develops a strategy to unite all these tools under one common set of recommendations and best practices.

Byron
Byron develops the GovTool WebApp, supports its launch, and runs a beta testing period to identify and fix bugs, gather feedback, and collect ideas.

Emurgo
Emurgo is focusing on the development and maintenance of the Serialization Library for efficient data handling, continuous improvement of the Yoroi Extension Wallet for secure asset management, updates to the Yoroi Mobile Wallet to enhance user experience, and the creation of educational materials to promote broader adoption and informed usage of Cardano's tools and features.

Galois
As part of the Halo 2 project, Galois leads the development of Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) to enable future interoperability within the Cardano economy.

Input Output Infrastructure
Input Output Infrastructure group develops and tests the Cardano governance node in preparation for CIP-1694 and ongoing maintenance.

Tweag
Tweag works on the Ouroboros Genesis mechanism, which allows new nodes to join the Cardano blockchain and bootstrap themselves without relying on a trusted service and also enables disconnected nodes to rejoin the network.

WellTyped
WellTyped develops new Log Structured Merge Tree (LSM) implementations to store the ledger's UTxO set on disk instead of in memory. This innovation significantly increases the number of UTxOs, supports more users, and allows nodes to run on cheaper, lower-spec machines.

VacLabs
VacLabs ensures the continued practical use of Ledger and Trezor hardware wallets for the Cardano community and makes enhancements to support the Conway era.

Future work

We are excited about several upcoming projects that will further our mission and provide significant value to our stakeholders. In our commitment to maintaining transparency, we will keep you informed with regular updates. Stay tuned!



Cardano continuity suppliers

Our supplier management strategy
Intersect facilitates and administrates the management and oversight of all supplier contracts on behalf of DevTrust. This captures an extensive role in the facilitation, execution, and ongoing administration of contractual agreements between DevTrust and its suppliers. Intersect will actively engage in the negotiation process, ensuring that contractual terms align with DevTrust's objectives, on behalf of the community.

Furthermore, Intersect will monitor the compliance and performance of suppliers, implementing necessary measures to uphold contractual obligations, optimize operational efficiency, and provide community transparency.

Change management process
Welcome to the Change Management Process for the Cardano Continuity contract managed by Intersect. This process ensures clarity on how changes can be introduced, providing certainty in our operations.

Scope of the process:
This procedure applies to changes made to adjust direction, scope, or effort between Planning Increments (PI) or Statements of Work (SoWs). It also covers changes to policies and procedures affecting delivery under the Continuity work plan.

This process does not apply to the regular PI planning cycles nor to SoWs that have not yet been agreed, which agree on scope and effort for an upcoming 3-month period.

Roles and responsibilities:
Change Requestor: Identifies the need for change, completes the change form, and ensures implementation and reporting. This role can be fulfilled by anyone representing an organization named within the contract subject to the change.

Change Manager: Manages change procedures, evaluates requests, and maintains records. A nominated person within Intersect’s Delivery Assurance Team.

Technical Steering Committee (TSC): Acts as the Change Advisory Board and evaluates requests.

Approver: TSC approves changes below the agreed threshold, while the Managing Director approves changes above.

Implementor: The Implementer is responsible for implementing the change.

Raising a new change request:
Discuss potential requests with involved parties before formally raising them, via email or the dedicated Delivery Assurance Slack channel.

Any party named within a contract can initiate a change request outside of the PI planning or SoW creation process.

Requests from third parties should be raised formally through the quality & feedback knowledge page for the TSC to take appropriate action.

The change requestor is responsible for completing the Change Request form.

Changes may be to the scope of work, allocated effort, timelines, or any other material change.

Formal recording of change requests via email to delivery@intersectmbo.org or during joint delivery assurance meetings and noted at the TSC.

Approving a new change request:
Changes to policies and procedures will also be included in this process where these have no material impact on the cost of delivery.

Changes in scope, effort, or cost implications are presented to the TSC for recommendation, before the change being agreed.

Final approval by Intersect's Managing Director (MD) for changes above set thresholds.

Recording & communicating a change request:
Intersect, as the Change Manager maintains a formal change log and updates the risk register for approved changes.

For change requests that require MD sign-off, the Change Manager will provide an update to the TSC.

For approved changes, impacted departments within Intersect are informed, and the community is notified via Gitbooks.

The Intersect Security Policy may supersede any change policy.

Cardano roadmap may be updated jointly by the Change Requestor & Manager to account for changes, and also account for new long-term work items. Roadmap items must be picked up from the roadmap via the regular planning process.

Exceptions and approval thresholds:
Emergencies (e.g. an urgent security issue) may allow immediate action with subsequent urgent notification to Intersect.

Initial changes require approval from the Managing Director until formal thresholds are established.

How we manage our continuity suppliers

What work has been completed since the start of Intersect
This page showcases the dedication and collaboration of our partners in driving the growth and success of Cardano.

Contractual progress
Below, you will find a live update displaying the number of milestones completed across all continuity contracts within the DevTrust. The progress is shown both in quantity and percentage, providing a clear overview of our achievements. This is updated on a Monthly basis.

![](https://docs.intersectmbo.org/~gitbook/image?url=https%3A%2F%2F844111662-files.gitbook.io%2F%7E%2Ffiles%2Fv0%2Fb%2Fgitbook-x-prod.appspot.com%2Fo%2Fspaces%252Fo50OuflyxfUMOt8hHPn2%252Fuploads%252F4y1hv2L7PFsaPmEIbWzi%252FChart%25201.jpeg%3Falt%3Dmedia%26token%3D657a3ef3-11c0-4fca-b873-ea344e050e48&width=400&dpr=3&quality=100&sign=5af33302&sv=1)

![](https://docs.intersectmbo.org/~gitbook/image?url=https%3A%2F%2F844111662-files.gitbook.io%2F%7E%2Ffiles%2Fv0%2Fb%2Fgitbook-x-prod.appspot.com%2Fo%2Fspaces%252Fo50OuflyxfUMOt8hHPn2%252Fuploads%252F0yXTKj7lBHPD6hwbfCza%252FChart%25202.jpeg%3Falt%3Dmedia%26token%3D4a71fff6-2629-4d43-a7c9-c6d8b32ac154&width=400&dpr=3&quality=100&sign=a4013027&sv=1)

Below is a comprehensive list of completed projects and milestones achieved by our Cardano Continuity suppliers. 
Contract	Duration	Progress	Summary
IOI - CIP-1649 , Backlog & Cardano Node Maintenance

1st Jan 24 - 31st Jan 25

1 / 4 Quarters complete

Enables continuation of development of CIP 1694 hard fork in addition to other development work to maintain the network.

WellTyped - LSM  1, 2, 3 & 4

24th Aug 23 - 13th Dec 24

5/11 Milestones Complete

This work develops new Log Structured Merge Tree implementations that will enable long-term scalability and sustainability for the Cardano node, by allowing large data structures to be stored externally to the node (eg on disk/SSD), but in a way that allows the data to be accessed efficiently when it is required.

Galois - Halo 2

31st July 23 - 17th June 24 [Delayed]

4/5 Milestones Complete

Halo 2 eliminates the need for a trusted setup. Development of Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) for future interoperability of the Cardano economy. This contract supports work on repeatedly refining proof obligations until a base obligation can be discharged.

Tweag - Genesis

1st Jan 24 - 31st May 24

6/8 Milestone Complete

Ouroboros Genesis mechanism: will enable new nodes to join the Cardano blockchain and bootstrap themselves without needing to rely on a trusted service. It also allows nodes to become disconnected and re-join the network in the same way.

EMURGO - Serialization Library, Yoroi Extension Wallet, Yoroi Mobile Wallet, Educational Materials

1st Jan 24 - 31st Jan 25

1/16 Milestones Complete

EMURGO produces Educational Materials which will cover every aspect of CIP 1694, testing and support of the Cardano Serialisation library, Yoroi Extension & Mobile Wallet

Tweag - OpenSource

17th Jan - 15th May 24

4/4 Milestones Complete

Conducted an assessment and provided advisory services to Intersect to develop the vision and strategy of the Open Source Program Office(“OSPO”), ensuring a successful transition for Cardano into an open-source environment

VacLabs - Ledger & Trezor hardware wallets

10th May 24 - 13th Mar 24
[Delayed]

4/6 Milestones Completed

Ensuring the continued practical use of the Ledger and Trezor hardware wallets for the Cardano community and enhancements to support the Conway era

DQuadrant HF Testing

10th May 24 - 17th July 24

0/7 Milestones Completed

Supporting Chang hard fork development activities by performing regression testing and testing of new features

Tweag - BlockFetch

20th May 24 - July 24

0/2 Milestones Completed

Developing a modification to the block fetch decision logic to ensure analogous responsiveness from block fetch peers.
A report on how to identify a certain type of attack and what actions could be taken to mitigate such it.

Tweag - Guardrails

20th May 24 - July 24

0/1 Milestones Completed

Tweag will provide IOG with audits for the Guardrail script which handles a filtering of users' proposals before being subjected to votes

Tweag - Identity Management

20th May 24 - Aug 24

0/1 Milestones Completed

Tweag will provide IOG with audits for the Identity management script which is an overlay. This script thus relies on the latest PlutusV3 features around governance.

Bitergia - Interactive Ecosystem Visualizations

Feb 24- Dec 24

0/6

Analyzing the footprint and ecosystem network of a client's open source community on GitHub to identify collaboration opportunities, visualize resource interdependence, and integrate external projects into an open dataset



Cardano continuity reports

Milestone report Q1 2024
Intro
Since the foundation of Intersect at the start of 2024, the Delivery Assurance team has been coordinating with a multitude of suppliers who are working to develop and maintain core Cardano. Throughout Q1 a number of important milestones have been completed, which are outlined in this summary.

Delivery Assurance forms part of Technical Operations team and coordinates continuity delivery partners to ensure the timely and reliable delivery of products, services, or projects - meeting specified requirements and expectations. You can read more about it here. 

Cardano “continuity” is defined or referred to as any approved technical service needed to build or fix current and future areas of the Cardano blockchain. Continuity in this definition can include new developments, such as the CIP-1694 governance software, component upgrades, or testing improvements, to name a few.

Summary of Q1 milestones completed
Below is a summary of the Q1 milestones completed by companies within the Continuity workstream:

Byron Network
The Byron team continue to develop the GovTool WebApp by supporting the launch and running a beta testing period to discover and fix bugs and collect feedback and ideas. In Q1 the following milestone was reported complete and described by the Bryron team below:

Milestone 1 - Design Phase 
Explore the new horizon of digital engagement with our latest design suite optimized for every screen:

Experience our homepage and dashboard designs, perfected for every device size from mobile (375px) to desktop (2560px), ensuring a responsive and seamless experience no matter where you are. 

Innovation Unleashed: 

Explore the future with our governance action submission and delegation flow designs, featuring wireframes and experiments that redefine the boundaries of user experience. First milestone in the path of Governance Actions delivery.”

Galois
As part of the Halo 2 project, Galois are leading the development of Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) for future interoperability of the Cardano economy.

Milestone 3 - Recursive Proof Verifier
“Galois has successfully delivered Milestone 3, implementing ZK circuits that verify Plonk proofs and adding ECC Chip support for multiple curves including Pluto/Eris. These are key building blocks to fully recursive ZK proofs, enabling benefits including zk-rollups and the ability to trade between blockchains.”

Input Output Infrastructure 
Input Output’s Infrastructure group is developing and testing the Cardano governance node in readiness for CIP-1694 and continuity maintenance.

CIP 1694 second fixes - this work included a large number of acceptance criteria including: the addition of bootstrap era support for Cardano node, execution of quality plan, finalizing Plutus v3 (cost model, testing), fixing of issues found interesting, updating of DB Sync & the deployment of all updates into SanchoNet.  

Governance support - development of a prototype guardrail script as well as a prototype constitutional committee credential management script

Repository migration - assisted with the migration of a second wave of repositories from IOG to Intersect

Network enhancements - developments of both a Genesis Lite & Peer Sharing Solution  as well as various P2P upgrades & enhancements

Tweag
Tweag are developing the Ouroboros Genesis mechanism (Genesis), which enables new nodes to join the Cardano blockchain and bootstrap themselves without relying on a trusted service. It also allows nodes to become disconnected and rejoin the network similarly. During Q1 they completed phase 3 of this work which consisted of the following Milestones:

Milestones 7, 9 & 10 - Limit on Patience, Genesis State Machine & Lightweight Checkpointing.
“As part of the ongoing effort towards full Cardano decentralisation, the Genesis team has delivered a number of milestones towards the implementation of Ouroboros Genesis. Tweag have now implemented the Genesis State Machine, which concerns the determination whether a node is caught up with the network or still syncing, as well as the limits on eagerness and patience”

WellTyped
Welltyped are developing new Log Structured Merge Tree implementations (LSM). These will store the ledger's UTxO set on disk rather than in memory, substantially increasing the number of UTxOs—supporting many more users—while also allowing nodes to run on cheaper, lower-spec machines.

Milestone 3 - Core Data Structures & Algorithms
“An intermediate milestone has been completed for the Cardano LSM on-disk storage component. This milestone covers the development of the core in-memory data structures and algorithms. Progress on this component is progress towards the goal of enabling Cardano to scale to much larger ledger state sizes (e.g. comparable to Bitcoin’s ~100M UTxOs), enabling higher transaction throughput, while keeping memory (RAM) requirements acceptable.”

VacLabs
VacLabs are working on ensuring the continued practical use of the Ledger and Trezor hardware wallets for the Cardano community and enhancements to support the Conway era. During Q1 they completed the following milestones:

Milestone 1 - Trezor Implementation
"Completed development of Trezor hardware wallet firmware and supporting libraries to support the Conway ledger era and its governance model as described within CIP-1694. Specifically, this upgrade allows smooth transition of users to the new era, as well as the ability to participate in governance by delegating to DReps. The code was tested internally, externally and pre-reviewed by Trezor, now just pending final review and release process.”

Milestone 2 - Ledger Implementation
“Completed development of Leder hardware wallet firmware app (and supporting libraries) to support the Conway ledger era and its governance model as described within CIP-1694. Specifically, this upgrade allows smooth transition of users to the new era for all devices, with the smaller memory devices allowing users to participate in governance by delegating to DReps. The larger memory devices (Nano X, Stax), support all actions of DReps and Constitutional Committee members. The code was tested internally, externally and has been reviewed by an external auditor appointed by Ledger. It is expected that these functionalities will be released by Ledger shortly.”

Milestone 3 - Supporting Tooling
“This is a highly technical milestone, to support a tweak in the ledger design. This supports some sets of data within transactions being tagged with the CBOR tag 258.

Updating this ensures a smooth transition for users from Babbage to Conway ledger era.”

It is anticipated that a full report, like the above, will be published at the end of each quarter, as well as smaller updates through our other channels and development updates. 



Quarterly reports

The Intersect Delivery Assurance team is one of the supportive, servant-leader, functional teams at Intersect. They support the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) in the operation and oversight of contracts which are in delivery. In Intersect, the delivery assurance team sits within the Technical Operations function. 

As Intersect formed, a number of continuity contracts were novated and to be managed on behalf of the community. Cardano “continuity” is defined or referred to in the contracts as any approved technical service needed to build or fix current and future areas of the Cardano blockchain. 

The delivery team was charged with setting up bootstrap and interim processes to facilitate the management of these contacts, as well as being involved in the process of the novation's. This retrospective report is intended to give you an update on what the team has achieved during Q1 and what the team has in store for Q2 2024.

Suppliers Introduction & Program Increment (PI) Planning
All continuity suppliers received an ‘Intro to Intersect’ evergreen presentation and a face to face with the team, outlining the changes in the ecosystem, reporting lines and details on proposed new billing and invoicing procedures.  

All suppliers brought into how Intersect intends to run planning for key continuity contracts. At Intersect we use PI planning and manage delivery in quarters at a time.

We have and continue to work with our continuity suppliers to revisit the confidentiality terms which were in their novated contracts. Rightly, some confidentiality may need to exist, but in some cases there is a little too much. This has prevented Intersect from sharing as much as we would have liked. We are continuing with our suppliers to agree new terms, which better reflect this era of Cardano we are all working in.

Contractual Obligations
We have set up and tested payment processes and systems so we are able to fulfil our contractual obligations and be able to pay suppliers and grantees. 

The majority of our continuity suppliers and grantees have been integrated into our payment process and have been tested, ensuring we send the correct payments at the right time.

Technical Steering Committee and Hard Fork Working Group
The delivery assurance team has established a bootstrap TSC. Ensuring fundamental processes are in place for suppliers to provide updates, that milestones and acceptance criteria are captured and documented. Which in turn trigger our contractual processes mentioned above. 

The initial Hard Fork working group has been stood up, containing the continuity suppliers who will ultimately deliver the CIP-1694 and supportive technology. 

Details of both this committee and working group have been added to Intersect’s knowledge base. Ready for the community to start to take an active role in shaping additional value, information and processes.

Procurement Process
The team has created a procurement process for the facilitation of contracts. Within the delivery assurance team we have a procurement function. A subset of the team who process, assess risks and facilitate contracts.

The team have developed and reviewed the new Intersect Master Service Agreements, Statement of Works and other supporting documents.

Developed a risk management process for contract management.

The procurement team also supports internal Intersect and business contracts and have processed; people resources, back office tooling (such as Google suite and Hubspot contracts), website development contracts and all the legal documentation required for the migration of the GitHub repositories to Intersect.

Budget and Finance
The delivery assurance team has also had responsibility to create and own the budget and finance process across internal Intersect functional teams and staff. 

Created a budget management process for functional teams (Technical Operations, Back-Office Operations, Marketing & Communications and Membership & Community) as well as budget management for suppliers, contracts, grants and our own people resources.

In a little over three months we have achieved a lot, but we understand that there is still some distance to go and there are always improvements we can make. As a team we have set some goals for the next quarter, below are some of the highlights.

Introduce financial tooling to support and industrialize our initial processes.

Create a legal playbook - to better facilitate changes in a quicker more controlled way, allowing for more sharing and collaboration from suppliers.

Create a change management process. From time to time we will inevitably need to change the contracts we administer. 

New delivery assurance page and delivery information on our knowledge base.

More regular delivery assurance updates and blog posts - we challenge ourselves to produce more regular and informative monthly and quarterly updates.

Introduction of members to the TSC to start shaping the future. 

Retrospective Q1 2024

Continuity Achievements for Q2
Byron
Byron continues to develop the Voltaire GovTool webApp by supporting the launch and running a beta testing period to discover and fix bugs and collect feedback and ideas. 

In Q2 they completed the following milestones. Below is a direct quote from the supplier:

Milestone 1 - Design Phase - Governance Action Submission. 
“Explore the New Horizon of Digital Engagement with Our Latest Design Suite Optimized for Every Screen: Experience our Homepage and Dashboard designs, perfected for every device size from mobile (375px) to desktop (2560px), ensuring a responsive and seamless experience no matter where you are.

Innovation Unleashed: Explore the future with our GA submission and Delegation flow designs, featuring wireframes and experiments that redefine the boundaries of user experience.

The first milestone in the path of Governance Actions delivery.”

Milestone 2 - Development Phase - DRep Explorer
“We have successfully completed the development phase of the Drep Explorer functionality for both desktop and mobile platforms. This significant milestone was achieved by fully implementing all features outlined in our dynamic Figma plan, encompassing both the originally planned functionalities and additional ones incorporated as we gained new insights throughout the development process. Preparations for Beta Testing have been started.”

Milestone 2 - Development Phase - Governance Action Submission
“We have successfully completed the development phase of the Governance Action  Submission tool for both desktop and mobile platforms. This milestone was achieved through the full implementation of all features as outlined in our evolving Figma plan. This includes both the functionalities we initially planned and those we added as we gained new insights during the development process. Initial work for integrating with the Proposal Discussion Forum has been started.”

GovTool - Support for Beta Testing - Deliverables 1 & 2 (Monthly - April)
“We're proud to announce a series of significant advancements and maintenance updates that have been implemented across our technology stack.”

DQuadrant
DQuadrant is focusing on developing a comprehensive testing strategy for dApps (decentralized applications). The key deliverables included the “Intersect dApps testing strategy document” and a reference document to support its implementation. These documents were designed to ensure the functionality and security of dApps through detailed testing protocol and strategic documentation. 

In Q2 they completed the following milestones. Below is a direct quote from the supplier:
Workstream 1 Milestone 1 -Investigation and design
“For Milestone 1, the DQuadrant team has developed and shared a comprehensive testing strategy for Dapps, complete with a guiding document to facilitate the strategy's implementation. This testing strategy is crafted with a clear mission: To ensure the delivery of reliable and functional decentralized applications via automated testing practices and active community involvement. The strategy is grounded in core values such as Quality, Security, Privacy and Trust, Transparency, Team Collaboration, Innovation, and Community engagement.

The following objectives are set to be achieved:

G1. Attain 90% Automated Test Coverage

G2. Automate 90% of Testing Processes

G3. Conduct Regular Security Audits to Eliminate High-Risk Vulnerabilities

G4. Establish Scalability and Performance Benchmarks

G5. Initiate Community Testing Programs

The strategy prioritizes test automation and leverages community collaboration. It outlines various tests applicable to different types of Dapps and their implementation methods.

This milestone lays out a roadmap for subsequent phases, where testing will be applied to various modules of the gov-tool. The forthcoming tests will adhere to the guidelines established in this strategic framework.”

Workstream 1 Milestone 2 -Develop testing boilerplate frameworks
“For Milestone 2, the DQuadrant team has updated the web-app-boilerplate repo with three PRs to set up the test boilerplate and integration with the reporting dashboard. This boilerplate enables current and future teams to add tests for Govtool pillars and render the test results in the reporting dashboard. The reporting dashboard is available here:

https://intersectmbo.github.io/govtool-test-reports/

This milestone enables current and future teams to add tests for Govtool pillars and render the test results in the reporting dashboard.”

Workstream 2 Milestone 1 - Design Test Cases
“For workstream 2 Milestone 1, the DQuadrant team has updated the Cardano-test-plans repository with the users' stories for Govtool application. The user stories are available here:

https://github.com/IntersectMBO/cardano-test-plans/blob/main/userStoryInventoryChangHF.md

The user stories added to this document are implemented with tests on the actual Govtool repo. These tests can be seen on the reporting dashboard here: 

https://intersectmbo.github.io/govtool-test-reports/govtool-frontend/”

Workstream 2 Milestone 2 - Refactor testing infrastructure
“For workstream 2 Milestone 2, the DQuadrant team refactored the testing infrastructure to be inline with the testing strategy. This involves having all cypress tests migrated to Playwright tests and replacing Cypress test dashboard with Allure dashboard. The deployed test dashboard is made available here:

https://intersectmbo.github.io/govtool-test-reports/govtool-frontend/

The tests are triggered on commits made to the test branch. This happens after the deployment of the test branch on the test infrastructure. After the deployment, the tests on frontend and the backend are triggered.

The dashboard shows the test results of all executions of the tests which represent the user stories defined on workstream 2, milestone 1. This milestone enables the team to see the regression of the tests with each new commit pushed to the repository and helps to detect and debug the bugs early.”

Workstream 3 Milestone 1 - Extend test coverage for DRep Explorer
“For workstream 3 Delivery 1, DQuadrant team refactored the existing tests related to DRep registration and added new tests for user stories. These tests are added to the test suites that get executed and reported when there is an update on the test branch. This keeps the status of the test report up-to-date. There are failing tests that indicate the bugs for which the team has created appropriate Github tickets and assigned the dev team. The deployed test dashboard is made available here: https://intersectmbo.github.io/govtool-test-reports/govtool-frontend/

The user stories for which tests were added under this milestone delivery are tracked here: https://github.com/IntersectMBO/govtool/issues/999

This milestone enables the team to see the regression of the tests with each new commit pushed to the repository related to DRep explorer user stories and helps to detect and debug the bugs early.”

Workstream 3 Milestone 2 - VVA App testing phase II
“For workstream 3 Delivery 2, the DQuadrant team refactored the existing tests related to Governance action and added new tests for 8 new user stories. These tests are added to the test suites that get executed and reported when there is an update on the test branch. This keeps the status of the test report up-to-date. There are failing tests that indicate the bugs for which the team has created appropriate Github tickets and assigned the dev team. The deployed test dashboard is made available here:

https://intersectmbo.github.io/govtool-test-reports/govtool-frontend/ 

The user stories for which tests were added under this milestone delivery are tracked here: https://github.com/IntersectMBO/govtool/issues/1000

This milestone enables the team to see the regression of the tests with each new commit pushed to the repository related to Governance action submission user stories and helps to detect and debug the bugs early.”

Galois
As part of the Halo 2 project, Galois is leading the development of Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) for future interoperability of the Cardano economy. 

In Q2 they completed the following milestones. Below is a direct quote from the supplier:
Milestone 4 - Recursive IVC API
“Galois has successfully delivered Milestone 4, implementing KZG accumulation and ZK circuits that verify IPA accumulation. These are key building blocks to fully recursive ZK proofs, enabling benefits including zk-rollups and the ability to trade between blockchains.”

Input Output Infrastructure
Input Output’s Infrastructure group is developing and testing the Cardano governance node in readiness for CIP-1694 and continuity maintenance. As part of this IOI has been working on CIP 1694 Second Fixes (including bug fixed, DB Sync Updates, and deployment to SanchNet), Governance Guardrail Support, Network Enhancements, and researching capacity improvement opportunities.

In Q2, they delivered Sanchonet 8.8, 8.9, 8.10, and 8.12 bringing the ability to use Plutus V3 in Conway-era transactions and containing the latest governance changes for SanchoNet. These releases include essential changes and fixes that are needed for the Chang hard fork and provide an implementation of CIP-69 for Plutus v3 (only).

Tweag
Tweag is developing the Ouroboros Genesis mechanism (Genesis), which enables new nodes to join the Cardano blockchain and bootstrap themselves without relying on a trusted service. It also allows nodes to become disconnected and rejoin the network similarly. Earlier this year Tweag completed Limit on Patience, Genesis State Machine & Lightweight Checkpointing. 

In Q2 they completed the following milestones. Below is a direct quote from the supplier:
Milestones 1, 2 & 4 - Open Source
“We worked on the Intersect MBO Business Project, which has a fixed project goal: "To conduct an initial assessment and provide advisory services to Intersect in order to develop the foundational vision and strategy of the Open Source Program Office(OSPO), ensuring a successful transition for Cardano into an open-source environment.”

The Cardano ecosystem needs to transition smoothly following the Voltaire 1694 Cardano Improvement Proposal, which details changing from the old organizational approach to a new, Member-Based Organization. The transition was already planned when our team members joined the OSO (Open Source Office) department. 

We evaluated, advertised, and assisted Intersect MBO OSO in elaborating on Vision and Strategy Development, Stakeholder Communication and Management, Open-Source Office implementation, and OSO organizational structuring. Our work included specific research and development activities to deliver new, adapted deliverables covering open-source industry standards, the open-source community, and the Intersect MBO organizational entities.

“We created a new documented base for the transition and continuity of the Cardano processes and projects, preparing the implementation of the Voltaire 1694 CIP and clarifying the mission, vision, and objectives. We integrated the governance model and structure, the delivery assurance reporting areas, and the GitHub repositories reporting mechanisms into existing reporting tools. We participated daily in all deliverables and actions required by the OSO Head.”

Milestone 11 - Genesis 4 GDD Governor
“The GDD Governor is the last major component of the Genesis functionality. It is responsible for disconnecting from peers offering chains which, in the best case, are sparser than the worst chains offered by other peers. This allows syncing to progress past the limit on eagerness since we now disconnect from peers that may have been holding us back.”

WellTyped
Welltyped is developing new Log Structured Merge Tree implementations (LSM). These will store the ledger's UTxO set on disk rather than in memory, substantially increasing the number of UTxOs—supporting many more users—while also allowing nodes to run on cheaper, lower-spec machines. As part of this work, an interim milestone focussed on Core Data Structures & Algorithms was achieved. 

In Q2 they completed the following milestones. Below is a direct quote from the supplier:
Milestone 3 –Core Data Structures and Algorithms
“An intermediate milestone has been completed for the Cardano LSM on-disk storage component. This milestone covers the development of the core in-memory data structures and algorithms.

Progress on this component is progress towards the goal of enabling Cardano to scale to much larger ledger state sizes (e.g. comparable to Bitcoin’s ~100M UTxOs), enabling higher transaction throughput while keeping memory (RAM) requirements acceptable.”

Milestone 4 - Core I/O Paths
“Well-Typed is developing an on-disk storage component intended to be used in Cardano to help Cardano scale to much larger numbers of accounts and UTxO sizes while preserving good system performance.

We have recently completed an intermediate technical milestone covering several key I/O code paths within the component. Benchmarks of these code paths indicate that we are on track to meet the overall performance targets for the component. Meeting these component performance targets will be important in the broader project that aims to enable Cardano to scale to much larger ledger states while preserving good overall system performance.”

VacLabs
VacLabs is working on ensuring the continued practical use of the Ledger and Trezor hardware wallets for the Cardano community and enhancements to support the Conway era. Earlier this year they successfully completed the development of the Trezor Hardware Wallet, Ledger Hardware Wallet Firmware App & supporting tooling.



Milestone report Q2 2024

Continuity April achievements
This report is a progress update which follows the Q1 Milestone Report issued last month and provides a summary of achievements related to Cardano continuity during the month of April.  

More information on continuity can be found here.

Dquadrant
Dquadrant is focusing on developing a comprehensive testing strategy for dApps (decentralized applications). The key deliverables included the “Intersect dApps testing strategy document” and a reference document to support its implementation. These documents were designed to ensure the functionality and security of dApps through detailed testing protocol and strategic documentation. 

During Q2 they completed the following milestone:

Milestones 1 - investigation and design
“For Milestone 1, the Dquadrant team has developed and shared a comprehensive testing strategy for Dapps, complete with a guiding document to facilitate the strategy's implementation. This testing strategy is crafted with a clear mission: To ensure the delivery of reliable and functional decentralized applications via automated testing practices and active community involvement. The strategy is grounded in core values such as Quality, Security, Privacy and Trust, Transparency, Team Collaboration, Innovation, and Community Engagement.”

Galois
Galois continued their critical work on the Midnight Halo 2 project, focusing on enhancing the capabilities of Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) within the Cardano ecosystem. During Q2 they completed the following milestone: 

“Galois has successfully delivered Milestone 4, implementing KZG accumulation and ZK circuits that verify IPA accumulation. These are key building blocks to fully recursive ZK proofs, enabling benefits including zk-rollups and the ability to trade between blockchains.”

Bloxico
Intersect is developing multiple different web app-based tools to allow users to engage with the important governance user journeys. This includes: GovTool, Proposal Discussion Forum, DRep Campaign Platform & Constitutional Committee Portal. As part of this work, Bloxico was responsible for developing a strategy to unite all of these tools under one common set of recommendations and best practices including: 

Cloud service provider

Orchestration and containerisation

Domain management

Monitoring technology

Networking configuration

Security measures

Continuous integration and deployment technologies

In April, the two milestones associated with this work were completed: 

Milestone 1 - investigation and design
“This is the first half of the effort to create a unified set of DevOps standards which can be applied across Intersect’s projects. This first draft shows considerable research and stakeholder evaluation to create a strategy which fits the needs of Intersect’s projects.

This project will lay critical foundations to align Intersect’s projects to a common set of DevOps standards. This drastically lowers the overhead of management of projects long term, whilst also lowering the bar to entry for developer teams.”

Milestone 2 - review, iteration, and approval
“After the initial draft, Bloxico shared their DevOps strategy with the client, took their feedback, and made improvements to the document. This step was very collaborative, involving a lot of input from the client to refine the strategy. The process is approved, which means it’s now ready to be implemented across different projects.”

Milestone report April 2024

Continuity May Achievements
This report is a progress update which follows on from the previous Milestone report issued in April and provides a summary of achievements related to Cardano Continuity during May.

More information on Continuity can be found in the Cardano Continuity Blogspot.

Byron
Byron Byron continue to develop the GovTool WebApp by supporting the launch and running a beta testing period to discover and fix bugs and collect feedback and ideas.

During May they completed the following milestones:

DRep Explorer - Milestone 2 & GovTool - Support for Beta Testing Milestone 1 & 2

“In the past month, the GovTool DevOps team focused on enhancing their infrastructure and deployment processes. Efforts were concentrated on speeding up container builds through the preparation of a base backend image, addressing and resolving Sentry errors reported in the console log, and refining the deployment workflow by overhauling the Makefile. Furthermore, the team implemented docker image versioning to improve version control and developed a Nix configuration for the frontend, aiming to streamline development and deployment activities. These tasks, pivotal for infrastructure management and DevOps, are meticulously documented and can be reviewed in detail through their respective issue links on GitHub.”

Governance Action Submission - Milestone 2

“We have successfully completed the development phase of the Governance Action Submission tool for both desktop and mobile platforms. This milestone was achieved through the full implementation of all features as outlined in our evolving Figma plan. This includes both the functionalities we initially planned and those we added as we gained new insights during the development process. Initial work for integrating with the Proposal Discussion Forum has been started.”

DQuadrant
Dquadrant are focusing on developing a comprehensive testing strategy for dApps (decentralized applications). The key deliverables included the “Intersect dApps testing strategy document” and a reference document to support its implementation. These documents were designed to ensure the functionality and security of dApps through detailed testing protocol and strategic documentation. 

During May they completed the following milestones:

Milestone 2 - Develop testing boilerplate frameworks

“For Milestone 2, the Dquadrant team has updated the web-app-boilerplate repo with three PRs to set up the test boilerplate and integration with the reporting dashboard. This boilerplate enables current and future teams to add tests for govtool pillars and render the test results in the reporting dashboard.

The reporting dashboard is available here: https://intersectmbo.github.io/govtool-test-reports/

This milestone enables current and future teams to add tests for govtool pillars and render the test results in the reporting dashboard.”


Milestone 1 - Design test cases

“For workstream 2 Milestone 1, the Dquadrant team has updated the cardano-test-plans repository with the users stories for govtool application. The user stories are available here: https://github.com/IntersectMBO/cardano-test-plans/blob/main/userStoryInventoryChangHF.md

The users stories added to this document are implemented with tests on the actual govtool repo. These tests can be seen on the reporting dashboard here:

https://intersectmbo.github.io/govtool-test-reports/govtool-frontend/”


Milestones 2 - Refactor testing infrastructure

“For workstream 2 Milestone 2, the Dquadrant team refactored the testing infrastructure to be inline with the testing strategy. This involves having all cypress tests migrated to Playwright tests and replacing Cypress test dashboard with Allure dashboard. The deployed test dashboard is made available here: https://intersectmbo.github.io/govtool-test-reports/govtool-frontend/

The tests are triggered on commits made to the test branch. This happens after the deployment of the test branch on the test infrastructure. After the deployment, the tests on frontend and the backend are triggered.

The dashboard shows the test results of all executions of the tests which represent the user stories defined on workstream 2, milestone 1. This milestones enables the team to see the regression of the tests with each new commit pushed to the repository and helps to detect and debug the bugs early.”

Input Output Infrastructure
Input Output’s Infrastructure group is developing and testing the Cardano governance node in readiness for CIP-1694 and continuity maintenance.

Milestone 1 - Delivery of node version 8.8, 8.9 & 8.10 to Sanchonet

 “8.8.0 - Release of the Cardano node, bring the ability to use Plutus V3 in Conway-era transactions. Plutus V3 brings several new capabilities such as a new Voting script purpose for writing voting scripts, access to governance actions in the ScriptContext, new cryptographic (BLS, Keccak256 and Blake2b-224) Plutus primitives, and more.”

“8.9 - Cardano Node 8.9.0 is a release that introduces genesis lite a.k.a bootstrap peers. This version fixes a small bug on the dynamic block forging logic and also includes some overall improvements."

“8.10 - This release contains the latest governance changes for SanchoNet. It has support for a new cost model for Plutus v3, plus new Plutus byte string primitives. The Constitution Committee quorum has been renamed to threshold in the CLI and a new economic parameter minFeeRefScriptCostPerByte has been added for reference scripts. This version of the node also adds support for reference scripts in the Conway era.”

WellTyped
Welltyped are developing new Log Structured Merge Tree implementations (LSM). These will store the ledger's UTxO set on disk rather than in memory, substantially increasing the number of UTxOs—supporting many more users—while also allowing nodes to run on cheaper, lower-spec machines.

During May they completed the following milestone:

Milestone 4  - Core I/O paths

“Well-Typed are developing an on-disk storage component intended to be used in Cardano to help Cardano scale to much larger numbers of accounts and UTxO sizes, while preserving good system performance. 

We have recently completed an intermediate technical milestone covering several key I/O code paths within the component. Benchmarks of these code paths indicate that we are on-track to meet the overall performance targets for the component. Meeting these component performance targets will be important in the broader project that aims to enable Cardano to scale to much larger ledger states while preserving good overall system performance.”



Milestone report May 2024

The "Monthly Maturity Report - May 24" provides an in-depth analysis of the development activities within the Cardano ecosystem for May 2024. 

Utilizing Bitergia analytics, the report highlights significant updates and trends, such as a decrease in overall commit activity but substantial updates in key projects like Plutus and Cardano Node. 

It details contributions from organizations like IOHK, Intersect MBO, and BinarApps, showing variations in their development efforts. The report also examines geographical distribution, project-specific insights, and repository activities, concluding with an emphasis on the robust and diverse open-source development within the Cardano community.

Open Source Developer Maturity Report May 2024

Continuity July Achievements

This report is a progress update which follows on from the previous Milestone report issued in June and provides a summary of achievements related to Cardano Continuity during the month of July.

More information on Continuity can be found in the Cardano continuity | Intersect - Knowledge Base  on the Intersect website.

Byron
Byron continue to develop the GovTool WebApp by supporting the launch and running a beta testing period to discover and fix bugs and collect feedback and ideas.

During July they completed the following milestones:
Milestone 3 - GovTool - Beta Testing  - DRep Explorer & Governance Action Submission
“We are pleased to announce the conclusion of the beta testing phase for our project, GovTool. We are incredibly grateful to all participants for their engagement, valuable feedback, and constructive criticism. Your contributions have significantly helped us improve the functionality and stability of the tool.”

Milestone 4 - GovTool - DRep Explorer - Hard Fork Product Release
“We will release the latest stable version of the DRep Explorer section into the production environment once all external dependencies are resolved. This version will be crucial for the bootstrapping phase.”

Milestone 5 - GovTool - Governance Action Submission - Hard Fork Product Release
“We will release the latest stable version of the delegation section into the production environment once all external dependencies are resolved. This version will be crucial for the bootstrapping phase.”

GovTool - Support for Beta Testing - Deliverables 1 & 2 (Monthly)
“Over the past month, the GovTool team has been actively engaged in this process, ensuring a smooth and efficient maintenance.”

DQuadrant
Dquadrant are focusing on developing a comprehensive testing strategy for dApps (decentralized applications). The key deliverables included the “Intersect dApps testing strategy document” and a reference document to support its implementation. These documents were designed to ensure the functionality and security of dApps through detailed testing protocol and strategic documentation.

DQuadrant are also helping with the Chang Hard Fork by carrying out thorough testing, including checking old and new features in Plutus v3. The contract involves important tasks like verifying transaction costs, making sure older versions still work, and comparing the performance of Plutus v2 and v3. The testing also includes checking governance actions, wallet functions, and how the system handles different network conditions. The goal is to ensure the blockchain remains strong and effective after the upgrade, with clear documentation to back up these efforts.

During July they completed the following milestones:
Milestone 2 - Governance Actions Load Testing
“The overall purpose of our project is to test the Cardano node readiness for the Chang hard fork. Milestone 2 focuses on load testing governance actions within the Cardano network.

For Milestone 2, we implemented and observed scenarios involving multiple votes on various governance action proposals. Three distinct scenarios were tested: a majority vote leading to the enactment of one proposal, an equal vote leading to the enactment of the first proposal, and insufficient votes leading to no enactment. These tests confirmed the system's ability to accurately process and enact governance decisions based on the voting outcomes.

This milestone validates the Cardano network's stability and governance capabilities. By validating the voting and proposal mechanisms under different conditions, we ensure that the network can efficiently handle governance actions. This contributes to improved network security, stability, and the overall reliability of the Cardano community's decision-making processes.”

Milestone 3 - Drep, Votes, Delegation Negative testing
“The overall purpose of our project is to test the Cardano node readiness for the Chang hard fork. Milestone 3 is centered on testing various scenarios related to DReps, voting, and delegation processes.

In Milestone 3, we implemented and validated scenarios involving DReps and vote delegation. The tests included generating DRep IDs, enforcing single delegation, verifying stake registration requirements for delegation, preventing multiple DRep registrations, and testing the retirement process for DReps. Each test confirmed the correct behavior of the network's governance mechanisms, such as ensuring an ADA holder cannot delegate to multiple DReps and that only registered DReps can retire.


This milestone contributes significantly to the Cardano network by ensuring the accuracy and security of its governance and delegation processes. By validating these critical functions, we ensure the network's ability to manage decentralized voting and delegation efficiently, thereby improving overall network security, stability, and trust within the Cardano community.”

Milestone 4 - DApp Testing (use case: NFT Marketplace)
“The overall purpose of our project is to test the Cardano node readiness for the Chang hard fork. Milestone 4 focuses on DApp testing with use-case DApp as Cardano Marketplace. It focuses on the integration of PlutusV3 with existing marketplace decentralized applications (DApps) initially developed using PlutusV2. This milestone is crucial for the broader testing of Cardano, as it ensures that upgrades to the smart contract platform do not disrupt existing applications and that new features are utilized effectively. 

In Milestone 4, we conducted extensive tests to assess the compatibility and performance of PlutusV3 in the context of marketplace DApps. This included verifying the functionality of buy, sell, and mint operations using updated reference scripts and documenting computational costs and associated fees. Benchmark tests were performed to evaluate the performance improvements of PlutusV3, and compliance with CIP-69 standards was also confirmed. 

This milestone contributes to the Cardano network by ensuring that the transition to PlutusV3 is smooth and beneficial for DApp developers and users. By validating the integration and performance of new smart contract features, we validate the overall functionality, efficiency, and scalability of the Cardano ecosystem, contributing to a more robust platform for future developments and innovations.”

Milestone 5 - Mass delegate-to-abstain testing
“The overall purpose of our project is to test the Cardano node readiness for the Chang hard fork. Milestone 5 focuses on testing the Cardano network's ability to handle mass delegation to abstain from voting. This milestone is important in the broader development of Cardano as it ensures that the network can manage large-scale voting behaviors and still function smoothly. 

For Milestone 5, we tested a scenario where a large majority of ADA holders delegated their voting power to abstain. We conducted tests with 1,000 and 10,000 wallets, where 99% of ADA holders chose to abstain. Despite this, the governance action to update the constitutional committee was successfully ratified by the remaining DReps and SPOs. These tests confirmed that the network could handle extensive abstention while still processing governance actions accurately. 

This milestone validates the Cardano network by proving its capacity to manage large-scale delegation behaviors without compromising functionality. Ensuring that the network can handle mass abstention improves its stability and reliability, contributing to a more secure and efficient governance process for the Cardano community.”

EMURGO
EMURGO produces Educational Materials which will cover every aspect of CIP 1694, testing and support of the Cardano Serialisation library, Yoroi Extension & Mobile Wallet.

During July they completed the following milestones:
Cardano Serialization Library: Deliverable 1: -Update Cardano Serialization Library to support Conway and Deliverable 2: Test and release CSL
“EMURGO has completed all the development and testing required to upgrade the CSL to support the changes introduced in Cardano's Conway era, including the distributed governance model described within CIP-1694. Further incremental beta releases will also enable user-based testing via the SanchoNet governance test network.”

Yoroi Extension Wallet: Milestone 1: Upgrade Yoroi extension wallet to support the Conway ledger era and  Milestone 2: Upgrade Yoroi extension wallet to support CIP95 with nightly release
“EMURGO has upgraded Yoroi Extension Wallet (Desktop) to support Cardano's Conway era, enabling users a smooth transition to the post-Chang hard fork. This deliverable also includes a beta release via Yoroi Nightly to allow connectivity to the SanchoNet governance test network, and the extension of Yoroi to support the CIP-95 standard.”

Yoroi Mobile Wallet -  Milestone 1: Upgrade Yoroi mobile wallet to support The Conway ledger era and Milestone 2: Upgrade Yoroi mobile wallet to support CIP-95
“EMURGO has upgraded Yoroi Mobile Wallet to support Cardano's Conway era, enabling users a smooth transition to the post-Chang hard fork. This deliverable includes a beta release, to allow connectivity to the SanchoNet governance test network, and the extension of Yoroi to support the CIP-95 standard.”

Input Output Infrastructure 
Input Output’s Infrastructure group is developing and testing the Cardano governance node in readiness for CIP-1694 and continuity maintenance.

During July they completed the following milestones:
Delivery of Identity Management for ICC
“This release contains the latest governance changes for Identity Management to allow ICC key build for Constitution. This version of the node also adds support for reference scripts in the Conway era.”

Delivery of Sanchonet 8.11
“This release contains the latest governance changes for SanchoNet. It has support for a new cost model for Plutus v3, plus new Plutus byte string primitives. The Constitution Committee quorum has been renamed to threshold in the CLI and a new economic parameter minFeeRefScriptCostPerByte has been added for reference scripts. This version of the node also adds support for reference scripts in the Conway era.”

WellTyped
Welltyped are developing new Log Structured Merge Tree implementations (LSM). These will store the ledger's UTxO set on disk rather than in memory, substantially increasing the number of UTxOs—supporting many more users—while also allowing nodes to run on cheaper, lower-spec machines.

During July they completed the following milestone:
Milestone 5 - Minimal Working Version
“Well-Typed are developing an on-disk storage component intended to be used in Cardano to help Cardano scale to much larger numbers of accounts and UTxO sizes, while preserving good system performance. 

In previous milestones we have delivered various pieces of internal functionality. In this milestone we have connected that internal functionality to the component’s public API for the first time. In particular we have filled in the part of the public API that covers basic key/value operations: lookup, insert and delete.

In addition for this milestone we have created a benchmark that simulates the UTxO workload (using the new public APIs for lookup, insert and delete) and measures the throughput. This benchmark will be used during the project to guide our work to improve performance, and at the end of the project to demonstrate whether the performance targets have been met.”

Milestone report July 2024

Lesson 54

Cardano is a blockchain network and associated infrastructure that provides social and financial interactions to network participants. The blockchain technology gives us the foundation to build an economy with a shared medium of exchange (ADA). 

For Cardano to thrive, we need to grow the economy that sits on the technology. One shared goal of the Cardano community is to drive the growth of Cardano. This can be achieved by evaluating future development based on contribution towards this economy.

Cardano economic growth derives from three main variables:

Competition (driven by increasing utility); more businesses competing for resources

Risk Management; insurance or other forms that encourage investment

Regulation; provides confidence to end users to trade in the economy

(Note: Risk & Regulation were part of the original Cardano White Paper)

Each goal outlined below will improve one or more of the three main economic variables described above. Technical goals that underpin the economy:

Participation; growing global participation drives transaction growth

Collective governance; decentralization means ada holders and network participants control & manage the economy

Performance; speed, memory and throughput all contribute to transaction growth

Interoperability; widening the economy to join with other economies increases transaction growth

Transparency & audit-ability; builds confidence to trade in the economy

The technical characteristics of blockchain that enable the economy:

Security; consistent need to main security for participants

Accessibility; need ease of access to drive participant growth

Availability; need consistent reliability to build confidence to use the network

Cardano economy

Introduction to Cardano's treasury system
A treasury system is a community controlled and decentralized collaborative decision-making mechanism for sustainable funding of the underlying blockchain development and maintenance.

The Cardano treasury system was outlined in the initial Cardano White Paper and latterly in the monetary policy, which can be found in the Cardano Docs repository. In addition, back in 2019, a research paper was published exploring the concept and mechanics in much more detail.

Maintaining, developing, and improving a blockchain project requires ongoing monetary support. The treasury was outlined to perform this function and provide funding for new features, improvements, and other adoption/utility/innovation initiatives which will be allocated through a community-approved decentralized process (aka on-chain voting as described in CIP-1694). 

Treasury Funding Methods
Cardano's treasury is funded through two methods {source}:

Monetary expansion from the Cardano reserves - the Cardano reserve is a fixed amount of ADA put aside when blockchain created which is gradually being burnt down to expand the treasury.

Blockchain fees to process transactions - the proportion of the treasury funded from blockchain fees rather than from Cardano reserves will increase over time. There is also the unspent treasury carried forward from the previous period. The temporal units in Cardano are Epochs. Which means the treasury gets topped up every Epoch by expansion from the reserves and fees.

![](https://docs.intersectmbo.org/~gitbook/image?url=https%3A%2F%2F844111662-files.gitbook.io%2F%7E%2Ffiles%2Fv0%2Fb%2Fgitbook-x-prod.appspot.com%2Fo%2Fspaces%252Fo50OuflyxfUMOt8hHPn2%252Fuploads%252Fltzr2HsaI3eBE0QSwRao%252Fimage.png%3Falt%3Dmedia%26token%3Df96d294d-f666-4356-9f81-b97860e142cc&width=400&dpr=3&quality=100&sign=f9763b9c&sv=1)

{Source CEX explorer}; Every 5 days, 0.3% is taken from the reserve together with collected fees and both are used for the epoch reward. From this amount, 20% is taken and put into the treasury. That's roughly 5.5M ADA every epoch. As the reserve declines, so do the contributions to the treasury. It is expected that in the future the income from the reserve will be gradually replaced by the income from fees, and subsequently network growth.

This method has been outlined, in more detail at the previous Catalyst Town Hall Presentation on April 20th 2022.

The reserves are a fixed amount of ADA that is expanded into the Treasury and will gradually burn down. The increased ADA available in the Treasury is then circulated into the market, allowing for more transactions.

As the Cardano economy develops, the proportion of the treasury funded from blockchain fees rather than from Cardano reserves will increase.

Cardano treasury

Cardano

Open grants can be found below, and members of Intersect are eligible to apply.

Community Tooling
Once implemented, CIP-1694 will provide a framework for on-chain decision-making for the Cardano ecosystem. These grants are designed to provide funding to build a minimal set of tools to support participation in Cardano's governance.

The categories
The grants will cover various categories opening over the coming weeks. Each category will have a four-week application window, so keep an eye on this page if you are waiting on a different category to open. We will also announce category openings on Discord and Telegram.

![](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/980490396356476938/1275500408596336761/image.png?ex=66c61dd3&is=66c4cc53&hm=f2140433eb4db18e1d201b2bc19c5387e42a7103e44dae3180d1ac57c58b0def&=&format=webp&quality=lossless&width=1274&height=795)

Open grants

Intersect's main aim is to facilitate the administration of decentralized governance on Cardano. As such, we would like to see community hubs across the globe being set up to support the CIP1694 Governance Technology.  Ensuring that local ideas and issues can be represented and considered for governance actions is essential so that Governance on Cardano is spread and benefits all, further enhancing the decentralization of governance on Cardano.

Intersect is looking for passionate and organized members of the Cardano community to step up and establish community hubs within their geographic location to help build, develop, educate, and enable the local community to contribute toward governance actions on Cardano.

Community hubs

Constitutional workshops have reopen for application to achieve our target of 50 countries hosting a constitutional workshop. To find out more and apply, please click here.

Please consider the requirements on the pages that follow before applying. Workshop dates can take place from 1st September to 15th October. 

All applications will be reviewed by the Civics Committee on a rolling basis until we have reached 50 different countries.


                                  Apply to become a constitutional workshop host
High quality constitutional workshops are critical to the creation of a new governing document for Cardano. Intersect will award grants valued at ₳8,000 - ₳12,500 ADA to assist in creating a productive, live event experience. Everyone is welcome to apply to become a workshop host and will be provided templates, training and materials to deliver a structured and effective workshop. In addition, each workshop will select constitutional delegates and alternates to attend the Constitutional Convention in Buenos Aires in December 2024.

Only Intersect members will be eligible to receive funding, but all hosts (irrespective of funding arrangements) will be supported with training and materials.

We want the scale of the global consultation effort to match the scale of the ambition - and one of Intersect’s core pillars - for Cardano’s governance to become fully community led. To achieve this, we are re-opening up applications for countries unrepresented in the current confirmed list of workshops. Our aim is to have 50+ workshops in 50 unique countries.

                              Constitutional workshop guidelines

As Constitutional Workshops are also the means by which the community will select constitutional convention delegates, each constitutional workshop must meet a quorum of participants. To elect any constitutional delegates and alternates, the minimum quorum for a constitutional workshop is 10 voting participants. Prospective workshop hosts will need to demonstrate at least 15 registrants to proceed with hosting a Constitutional Workshop. To ensure a high quality, organized live constitutional workshops, prospective hosts are also encouraged to invite members of their community that represent the following areas of expertise or interest:

Legal and/or constitutional expertise

Technical expertise, including Cardano smart contract developers, Stake Pool Operators, DAOs, DeFi, Dapp builders and more (not exhaustive)

Translators

Aspirational DReps

Dapp users and consumers

Cardano educators

Expert facilitators will provide professional workshop support for each host. The facilitators will provide facilitation training, templates, educational materials, tooling and office hours to help each host prepare for their constitutional workshop. These facilitators will also attend the constitutional workshop virtually or in person to support the host. The draft constitution will be provided to hosts prior to their constitutional workshop for distribution to workshop participants.

                                    Your commitment as a host
Requirements:
To host the workshop, you should expect to commit up to 50 hours of your time, from beginning to end.

Expect to participate in on-boarding, training, recruiting participants, running the workshop, and providing outputs to Intersect. To recognize this effort, we expect hosts to specify an amount of ADA (roughly 2,500 ADA) for facilitation.

You are able to host a day long (6-8 hrs), in-person workshop between September 1 and Oct. 15th.

You are willing to provide contact information publicly.

You are willing to work with Intersect’s facilitators to deliver a constitutional workshop with their support.

You are willing to follow a standardized workshop format.

You are willing to follow a standardized process to select constitutional delegates and alternates to attend the convention, including the use of a digital voting tool. Intersect will provide a standard tool and process to this end.

You can enable virtual attendance. No virtual attendance will be allowed except to support facilitators if required. (updated on 14th August 2024)

You will be able to provide final outputs and documentation of your workshop in English.

Accept constitutional delegate candidacy videos from people who cannot attend the workshop live. No candidacy videos will be accepted for delegation. (updated on 14th August 2024)

Restrictions:
Up to 50% of your funding will be available before your constitutional workshop, and will be approved on a case-by-case basis. For example, it can be used to secure the venue.

A maximum of 5% of the funding may be used for swag.

Hosts will be selected with consideration to geographical distribution, aiming to distribute workshops across the globe.

The stipend is not intended to cover travel costs, as these workshops are locally-oriented. Virtual participation should be made possible for those too far away in the region to travel.

Payment:
Following evaluation and selection of successful participants, Intersect will issue a contract with full detail of the agreement and payment/invoicing process. In this contractual agreement, Intersect will agree to distribute the Grant to the selected Host as per the following:

a. [50%] with effect from the date the contractual Agreement is signed by both parties providing the grantee has provided a date for the event, a preferred venue, a draft agenda and a budget breakdown;

b. [50%] with effect from the date the Event is complete, as evidenced by the Grantee producing all remaining Deliverables listed below.

Deliverables:
In advance the host will be required to:

Decide on a date and secure a venue, plan for food, swag etc.

Promote the workshop at least 2 weeks ahead of time

Attend training and office hours to prepare

Provide prep materials to participants ahead of the constitutional workshop

Ensure proper venue set-up

Following the constitutional workshop, the host will be required to:
Finalize outputs and submit them to Intersect including:

Draft Constitution feedback

Results of the constitutional delegate vote

Meet with the Intersect team for clarifications on outputs.

Submit final expenses to Intersect.

Constitutional workshops

Interim Constitution - Until a final Cardano Constitution has been developed and ratified by the community - a programme of consultation that will take place during 2024 - a set of interim rules will be required to support the transition. The interim Constitution will define both the on-chain ‘technical’ and the off-chain ‘governance’ guardrails needed to maintain the security and reliability of the blockchain. Without an interim Constitution, the interim Constitutional Committee cannot fulfill its role in ensuring (within a limited scope) the constitutionality and technical soundness of on-chain governance actions. The process to develop an interim Constitution started by defining both technical and governance guardrails within committees of Intersect. As the steering bodies within this organization, committees provide recommendations for the Cardano community. Once finalized, the content of the interim Constitution will be included in the Chang upgrade (see CIP-1694 or our recent article on the milestones and key terms). Also, development is underway for technical guardrails within a smart contract framework, which will support the interim Constitution on-chain.

Draft Constitution - The starting text for constitutional workshops to review, debate, and update. This document serves as a revision of the Interim Constitution and represents a mid-way point in the development of a final Cardano Constitution.

Cardano Constitution - As referred to in this document, this is the constitution ratified by ada-holders through on-chain voting following the Constitutional Convention.

Delegate Representative (DRep) - A governing body of the CIP-1694 governance system who votes on governance actions. They are concerned about more than constitutional matters.

Constitutional Delegate and Alternate - Selected at the constitutional workshops to be a representative of the Cardano community to attend the Constitutional Convention.

Constitutional Workshops - A series of up to fifty (50) workshops to review the Draft Constitution. They will be hosted by select community members around the world. Constitutional Workshops will select Constitutional Delegates and Alternates who are responsible for attending the Constitutional Convention to approve the Draft Constitution.

Constitutional Convention - A multi-day event for Constitutional Delegates and Alternates to attend, with the goal of making final decisions on any outstanding questions within the Draft Constitution to approve, through 1-delegate, 1-vote. If approved at the convention, the final constitution will be put on-chain for ada holders to ratify.

Key terms and Resources

What are the requirements for being a constitutional workshop host?
To host the workshop, you should expect to commit up to 50 hours of your time, from beginning to end.

You are able to host a day long (6-8 hrs), in-person workshop between August 1 and Oct. 15th.

You are willing to provide contact information publicly.

You are willing to work with Intersect’s facilitators to deliver a constitutional workshop with their support.

You are willing to follow a standard constitutional workshop format.

You are willing to follow a standard Constitutional Delegate election process.

You feel comfortable ensuring virtual attendance to your constitutional workshop for facilitators if necessary. All other workshop attendees must be in person.

You will be able to provide final documentation of your constitutional workshop in English.

How long should the workshop be?
6-8 hrs

Do I need to do any preparation work in advance?
Decide on a date and secure a venue, plan for food, swag etc.

Promote the workshop at least 2 weeks ahead of time

Attend training and office hours to prepare

Provide prep materials to participants ahead of the Constitutional Workshop

Ensure proper venue set-up

Accept Constitutional Delegate candidacy videos from people who cannot attend the workshop live No Candidacy videos will be accepted for delegation (updated on 14th August 24).

Can a Host also be the chosen Constitutional Delegate for the Constitutional Convention?
Yes, but they must be properly selected through the election process.

I’m not a Constitutional Workshop Host: can I be a Constitutional Delegate?
Yes, you can! You will need to attend a workshop or submit a candidacy video, and be selected by attendees.

How do I find out more about becoming a Constitutional Delegate and apply?
More information about the role and responsibilities of the Constitutional Delegate and Alternate will be posted on the Intersect Constitution landing page ahead of the constitutional workshops starting in August.

If you can attend a Constitutional Workshop, you may run for election at the constitutional workshop. If you cannot attend, you must submit a video file for the host to present at the constitutional workshop, and you will be added to the ballot. No Candidacy videos will be accepted for delegation (updated on 14th August 24).

Overview
Govtool and the Constitutional Committee Portal are part of the foundational community tools that will support Cardano governance. To make these tools more accessible, Intersect is providing a grant to implement a tool that allows Cardano community to participate in doing the translations and grants to do the actual translations into the key selected languages.

Sub-Categories
There will be 3 subcategories of grants provided:

A Grant to implement the translation tool

Grants to translate GovTool and the Constitutional Committee Portal. Please note, the first grant needs to be delivered for this to be actioned.

Grants to translate the Interim Constitution. Please note, this will be offered to Constitutional workshop hosts and participants to take the lead with their local language, including self-assessment that the translation has been done correctly.

Inclusion and Accessibility phase 2

Context
Govtool and Constitutional Committee Portal frontend are built on top of NextJS stack which has full I18n support since version 10. The i18n routing support is currently meant to complement existing i18n library solutions like react-intl, react-i18next, lingui, rosetta, next-intl, next-translate, next-multilingual, tolgee, inlang and others by streamlining the routes and locale parsing.

The internationalization (and translations) work by providing the list of locales, the default locale and domain-specific locales, and the tech stack will automatically handle the routing.

The frontend stack itself is already configured as explained above. Now we need the community contributors to work on the translations and internationalization files holding key-value pairs of strings used across the interface. The default en-UK version will be provided.

In order to provide the right tooling to community contributors to work on the translations, we need to implement a Translation Management system. Translized, Smartling, Localize or similar OR we can leverage from newer AI tooling.

Solutions like Poedit offer online translations tools which can be integrated into our frontends so that users themselves can suggest better translations maintaining the context of written word in different languages.

Functional Requirements
The successful applicant will be required to deploy Poedit, the localisation management system, and configure it to support GovTool translations and localisations to selected languages. The successful applicant will integrate Poedit with the Intersect GitHub account to more easily manage the localization of language files hosted on GitHub. Initially, the successful applicant will be required to use Automatic Translation feature which will allow us to use machine translation engines from Google, Microsoft and DeepL.

Once configured, the tool will be used by contributors to work on the translations in selected languages.

Budget
This grant is for 5,000 ADA.

A Grant to implement the translation tool

Context
Multi-language support for Govtool and Constitutional Committee portal will make these foundational governance tools more accessible to a wider group. Intersect is offering one grant for each of the key languages identified to people with a good understanding of Cardano, its governance described in CIP-1694, and Govtool (currently live in its beta version on sanchogov.tools).

Functional Requirements
The successful applicants will be required to translate all the copy present in the current version of Govtool and in the new features that will be deployed in Q2 from English to their chosen language (this includes also main headers and bodies, labels, success, and error messages, etc) as well as the copy present in the Constitutional Committee Portal. Support to translate the Interim Constitution will be specified in a separate grant.

Languages to be supported:

Portuguese

Spanish

Chinese

French

Japanese

Swahili

Italian 

Budget
5,000 ADA for each full language fully supported on Govtool and Constitutional Committee Portal, for a total of 35,000 ADA. This will be disturbed to one grantee per language who will take on the task of fully completing the translation through Poedit. Thereafter others will be able to edit and adjust, through Poedit.

To Apply
This grant will open on award and completion of the first grant to build the translation tool, Poedit. 

Grants to translate GovTool and the Constitutional Committee Portal

Context
The Interim Constitution has been in place from hard fork and will remain until the final constitution is ratified. Intentionally minimal and reflects the tenets of CIP-1694.

The Cardano Constitution will impact all members of the Cardano community. Grants will be provided for translations of the original text into other languages so more members of the community are able to read it.  Because it may not be possible for translations to capture the exact legal meaning of the original text, the English version will remain the authoritative source. The Interim Constitution and translations will be displayed within the Constitutional Committee portal. Intersect is offering one grant for each of the key languages identified to people with a good understanding of Cardano, its governance described in CIP-1694.

Functional Requirements
Translate the entire Interim Constitution (including appendices) into another language. Protocol parameter names should be left in English.

The translated version begins with this translated warning message: This version of the Cardano Constitution has been translated from the original. Only the version that matches the on-chain hash is the official Cardano Constitution.

The translator should understand the legal context and 1694 governance.

Suggested languages to be supported, aligned to GovTool translations:

Portuguese

Spanish

Chinese

French

Japanese

Swahili

Italian 

Budget
Containing about 35 pages of technical text, the grants for translations will be 4,000 ADA for each language, for a total of 28,000 ADA

To Apply
Intersect will supply a document with the Interim Constitution for direct translation. This will be offered to Community Hubs to take the lead with their local language, including self-assessment that the translation has been done correctly. 

Grants to translate the Interim Constitution

Proposal discussion forum
This grant category closed on 11th December 2023. 

With on-chain governance, introduced by CIP-1694, ada holders will be empowered to submit a governance action (GA) directly onto the Cardano mainnet. This ability will transform how decisions are made for the blockchain. 

To support CIP-1694's on-chain features, during the course of the CIP-1694 community workshops, attendees consistently requested off-chain processes and features to ensure GA's have been widely considered and socialized before they are submitted on-chain. 

The Proposal Discussion Forum
To respond to the feedback, Intersect is opening up a grant for members to develop a proposal discussion forum. It should be a tool which enables, promotes, and facilitates structured public discourse, and presents the most relevant information about proposals. The tool will ultimately support ada holders when evaluating the strength of a proposal (and a subsequent governance action).




Closed grants

Minimum functional requirements
Must have (in no particular proirity order)

Community members log-in via email address and/or wallet connect

Proposal submission form - (details below)

Proposal comments form - (details below)

Single choice opinion Poll (Yes/No) to test consensus on a proposal

The author of proposals should be able to edit and update their proposal

Generates an anchor - URL that points to an off-chain JSON file containing all the information generated for a specified proposal within the Proposal Discussion Forum

Open APIs allow other services to query proposal information alongside public endpoint with JSON structured data containing all information generated for a specified proposal 

Proposal search and filtering

Moderator role, to keep the forum clean (neutralizing spam and spambots, profanity check and ability to remove, hide, delete, or flag inappropriate content) 

Minimum required fields for the Proposal Submission Form:
The list below should align with what is decided in the governance metadata CIP. 

Form fields

Description

Author ID

ID of author: 

A way for the users to identify the author of the proposal

A way to allow the platform to identify which proposal belongs to who - permissions control

Nice to have: Possibly a way to allow this platform to connect the off-chain and the on-chain author

Proposal ID

Auto generated unique identifier for the proposal

GA Type

Indicate which type of GA this proposal represents

Title

The proposal name should give an indication of the Governance action that community members are trying to achieve. Keep it simple and informative.

Abstract

A concise summary of your proposal that provides the essential information such as the problems, implications (200-character limit including spaces)

Motivation/problem

Detailed description of the motivation/problem

Solution

The proposed solution. Explain how it is aligned with the motivation/problem.

Supporting links

Allows proposer to share links to different resources (e.g. PDFs, images, website/ GitHub and additional URLs).

Tags

Nice to have: Tags with keywords related to the proposal

Minimum required fields for the Proposal Comment Form:
Form fields

Description

Author ID

ID of the comment’s author

Comment

Once a proposal is submitted the discussion starts by users adding comments

Supporting links

Allow users to share additional information. e.g. PDFs, images, Website/ GitHub and additional URLs

Functional requirements

Minimum non-functional requirements
The Proposal Discussion Forum will be a pillar of the Voltaire governance tooling system. This means that it should be built using a compatible tech stack where applicable, make use of the existing design elements (design library to be provided), and be developed (or transferable) into the open repos that will be made available ahead of development.

The ultimate objective is for these tools to appear to the user as one solid application with an end-to-end experience of all the steps needed to participate in Cardano governance. Tools will share the same look & feel, but will consist of micro-frontends with the actual code for each tool or service maintained in separate folders or repos.

Context can be found in this initial visualization, which gives initial ideas of how to use the design system and how to integrate with the existing functions. This short video shows what is currently implemented in the Voltaire governance tooling system.  

Usability
The proposal discussion forum should be accessible to non-technical users

Proposal discussions should be transparent and easy to engage

Meet WCAG 3.0 AA standards for accessibility

Development needs to include i18n standards for internationalization

Scalability
In order to establish the legitimacy of the proposals, there must be sufficient participation so we expect this tool would need to support at least 250,000 concurrent users

Performance
Responsiveness of the tool: Front page load time must be no more than 2 seconds for users that access the website using an LTE mobile connection

Open source requirements
Guidance related to open source requirements will be provided

Guidance related to expected best practices to follow will be provided

Technical specification requirements for FE (to ensure integration)
NextJS / React

Material UI

(optional if applicable) Axios

IP rights
The code must be open source with an open source license that permits the assets to be changed, redistributed, and used commercially (suggested: Apache 2.0 for code and CC BY 4.0 for other documents and assets)

Any third party dependencies must not hinder the assets from being changed, redistributed and used commercially

The assets created for this proposal are universally accessible on a public repository by the time the project has completed

The assets created for this proposal must migrate into Intersect’s repositories if requested by Intersect

Deployment and environment requirements
Run separate development and testing environments for the duration of development

Other guidance related to deployment, environments requirements will be provided

Non-functional requirements

Priority list of “nice to have “ functions
Priority list of “nice to have “ functions

Community members can log in via social media 

Version Control: to identify changes in proposals and/or comments

Role identification (DReps, Intersect Committee Members, etc.)

Leaderboard - New & Unread topics/most active user on the discussion forum tool, based on specific parameters (e.g. discussions created, votes received)

Any feature you can think of that would improve the quality of Cardano governance discussions. Be creative!

Optional functions

Consider the below before submitting your application

When thinking about applying for this grant, responses to the brief should consider how the Proposal Discussion Forum could surface proposals before they become governance actions. Stages such as:

Proposal submission

Proposal discussion

Proposal polling 

The features that you could include under each area is under your creative direction. To help, this is an overall flow map, highlighting the key steps that the Proposal Discussion Forum will need to support.

Expected cost range
There is no set amount for this grant, as we would prefer applicants to specify the amount needed to implement their proposed solution, allowing for a broader range of creativity and ambition. However, as a steer, we expect the costs to fall between 90,000 - 180,000 ADA. Note that you may still propose outside of this range with strong rationale.

Timings and milestones
This grant will follow a milestone reporting approach and your application should note the expectations below. This will help with scope and various other parts to your application.

The timelines below are indicative, and broadly align with the CIP-1694 roadmap.

Milestone

Due Date

Design Phase (System Architecture + UX/UI design)

Dec 15, 2023

Testable prototype

Jan 31, 2024

MVP - meets minimum requirements, fully working version

Mar 31, 2024

V1.0 - start to implement new features (may be based from the nice to have list) and/or improvements

May 31, 2024



Considerations

Key Terms
A few key terms and definitions mentioned in this brief related to Cardano’s on-chain governance:

Cardano Improvement Proposal (CIP)

CIP-1694

Governance Action (GA)

Anchor

Metadata (from Anchor)

Proposal

Proposal ID

Resources
CIPs
CIP-1694

CIP-0095

Governance metadata standard CIP

Ledger and SanchoNet
Sancho.network

Draft Conway CDDL Design

Conway Ledger Backlog

Latest Node Releases

User tools
Tools on SanchoNet built by the community

GovTool Demo

A forthcoming feature of GovTool will be on-chain proposal submissions for Governance Actions. It will be built, open-sourced and serve as the first example of how this can be achieved.

Libraries
Serialization library alpha build: browser, nodejs, asmjs, crates.io Cardano-serialization-lib

DB-sync
Sancho-1-1-0 build

Sanch-1-1-0 ChangeLog

Sanch-1-1-0 Schema Docs

Sanch-1-1-0 Postgres Migrations

Key Terms and resources

With on-chain governance introduced by CIP-1694, ada holders will be able to delegate their voting power to Delegate Representatives (DReps), community members representing other ada holders in voting. This concept is the central element of liquid democracy in the age of Voltaire.

To support the delegation process and increase informed decision-making when delegating, ada holders need a common space to discover and explore registered DReps. Building on the feedback captured in the community-led CIP-1694 workshops, it’s imperative that ada holders can identify a DRep’s  domain of expertise, their perspectives and interests, how they voted in the past, and much more.  Equally, DReps need a place where they can share their profile and credentials, and campaign for ada holders to delegate their voting power to them.

The DRep campaign platform
To support this goal, Intersect is opening up a grant opportunity to fund the development of a DRep campaign platform, a tool to enrich the vital role DReps and delegation play in Cardano’s on-chain governance.



DRep campaign platform

Enable DReps to create profiles showcasing and highlighting their role in Cardano, and their perspectives on governance

Facilitate the DRep delegation process (for example, by linking to the unique on-chain identifier for a DRep)

Align with the CIP-0100? | Governance Metadata to structure the extra content DReps will provide

Implement wallet connect functionality over CIP-30 and CIP-95 to identify and verify DReps and delegators from their wallet

Allow DReps to update their metadata (additional context about them)

Allow DReps to provide updates to the ada holders who delegated to them

Usability
The DRep campaign platform should be accessible to non-technical users

Proposal discussions should be transparent and easy to engage with

Meet WCAG 3.0 AA accessibility standards 

Support for i18n/localization

Scalability
There must be enough participation to establish the legitimacy of the DRep campaign process. The tool would need to support at least 250,000 concurrent users.

Performance
Tool responsiveness: front page must load within 2 seconds for users accessing the website using an LTE mobile connection

IP rights
The code must be open source, with an open source license that permits the assets to be changed, redistributed, and used commercially (suggested: Apache 2.0 for code and CC BY 4.0 for other documents and assets)

Any third party dependencies must not hinder or prevent  the assets from being changed, redistributed, and used commercially

The assets created for this proposal will be universally accessible on a public repository by the time the project is complete

The assets created for this proposal must migrate into Intersect’s repositories if requested by Intersect

Open source requirements
While this instance is unique to the ways of working to Intersect member, IOG, open source best practice can be referenced from here: Cardano Engineering Handbook

Guidance related to open source policy can be referenced here

Guidance related to expected best practices can be referenced here 

Technical specification recommendations for FE (to support integration)
NextJS / React

Material UI

i18next (or equivalent. New version support i18n without additional plugin)

Enable integration of social media profiles

Provide a direct link or interoperability with on-chain delegation tools (eg Voltaire GovTool)

Allow DReps to poll their delegators to gauge sentiment in particular areas (eg with likes/dislikes)

Allow ada holders to follow and connect with their DReps (perhaps through direct messages)

Provide a multimedia experience (eg video content) that makes the delegation process interactive and accessible 

Any other feature the applicant can think of that will improve the quality of Cardano governance. Be creative!

Optional features

Expected cost range
There is no set amount for this award, as it’d be preferable for applicants to specify the amount needed to implement their proposed solution, allowing for a broader range of creativity. However, to help applicants sense-check their proposal, the costs would be expected to be in the range of 90,000 - 180,000 ada. Proposals outside this range with a valid reasoning will also be considered.

Suggested minimum milestones
The milestones below are indicative and proposals should ideally not exceed a six month delivery plan. Proposals should also broadly align with the CIP-1694 roadmap. 

The milestones below are indicative and proposals should ideally not exceed a six month delivery plan. Proposals should also broadly align with the CIP-1694 roadmap. 

Milestone

Due Date

Design phase (system architecture + UX/UI design)

Feb 21, 2024

Testable prototype

Mar 21, 2024

MVP - meets minimum requirements, fully working version

Apr 21, 2024

V1.0 - start to implement new features (may be based from the nice-to-have list) and/or improvements

May 31, 2024



Before diving into specifics, here are a few key terms and definitions mentioned in this brief, and related to Cardano’s on-chain governance:

Cardano Improvement Proposal (CIP)

CIP-1694

Governance Action (GA)

Metadata Anchor

CIP-30

CIP-95

Voltaire GovTool

Lesson 22

With on-chain governance introduced by CIP-1694, ada holders will be able to delegate their voting power to Delegate Representatives (DReps), community members representing other ada holders in voting. This concept is the central element of liquid democracy in the age of Voltaire.

To support the delegation process and increase informed decision-making when delegating, ada holders need a common space to discover and explore registered DReps. Building on the feedback captured in the community-led CIP-1694 workshops, it’s imperative that ada holders can identify a DRep’s  domain of expertise, their perspectives and interests, how they voted in the past, and much more.  Equally, DReps need a place where they can share their profile and credentials, and campaign for ada holders to delegate their voting power to them.

The DRep campaign platform
To support this goal, Intersect is opening up a grant opportunity to fund the development of a DRep campaign platform, a tool to enrich the vital role DReps and delegation play in Cardano’s on-chain governance.

Enable DReps to create profiles showcasing and highlighting their role in Cardano, and their perspectives on governance

Facilitate the DRep delegation process (for example, by linking to the unique on-chain identifier for a DRep)

Align with the CIP-0100? | Governance Metadata to structure the extra content DReps will provide

Implement wallet connect functionality over CIP-30 and CIP-95 to identify and verify DReps and delegators from their wallet

Allow DReps to update their metadata (additional context about them)

Allow DReps to provide updates to the ada holders who delegated to them

****

Usability
The DRep campaign platform should be accessible to non-technical users

Proposal discussions should be transparent and easy to engage with

Meet WCAG 3.0 AA accessibility standards 

Support for i18n/localization

Scalability
There must be enough participation to establish the legitimacy of the DRep campaign process. The tool would need to support at least 250,000 concurrent users.

Performance
Tool responsiveness: front page must load within 2 seconds for users accessing the website using an LTE mobile connection

IP rights
The code must be open source, with an open source license that permits the assets to be changed, redistributed, and used commercially (suggested: Apache 2.0 for code and CC BY 4.0 for other documents and assets)

Any third party dependencies must not hinder or prevent  the assets from being changed, redistributed, and used commercially

The assets created for this proposal will be universally accessible on a public repository by the time the project is complete

The assets created for this proposal must migrate into Intersect’s repositories if requested by Intersect

Open source requirements
While this instance is unique to the ways of working to Intersect member, IOG, open source best practice can be referenced from here: Cardano Engineering Handbook

Guidance related to open source policy can be referenced here

Guidance related to expected best practices can be referenced here 

Technical specification recommendations for FE (to support integration)
NextJS / React

Material UI

i18next (or equivalent. New version support i18n without additional plugin)



Enable integration of social media profiles

Provide a direct link or interoperability with on-chain delegation tools (eg Voltaire GovTool)

Allow DReps to poll their delegators to gauge sentiment in particular areas (eg with likes/dislikes)

Allow ada holders to follow and connect with their DReps (perhaps through direct messages)

Provide a multimedia experience (eg video content) that makes the delegation process interactive and accessible 

Any other feature the applicant can think of that will improve the quality of Cardano governance. Be creative!



Key Terms and resources
Before diving into specifics, here are a few key terms and definitions mentioned in this brief, and related to Cardano’s on-chain governance:

Cardano Improvement Proposal (CIP)

CIP-1694

Governance Action (GA)

Metadata Anchor

CIP-30

CIP-95

Voltaire GovTool

Key Terms and resources 

Overview
The Constitutional Committee (CC) is one of the three groups responsible for ratifying governance actions under CIP-1694, alongside SPOs and DReps. This committee will be responsible for voting on governance actions to ensure compliance with the Cardano Constitution. The role of the Constitutional Committee is critical in the governance process, and its votes and decisions will be important for ADA holders to understand.

Constitutional Committee Portal
Responding to community feedback via the CIP-1694 community workshops, Intersect are looking for proposals to build a new Constitutional Committee Portal. The Constitutional Committee Portal will be a tool for the CC to share their voting record and accompanying rationale as to why a governance action was either constitutional or unconstitutional. The portal will also be a common space to store the Cardano Constitution for all ada-holders to view. This portal will be critical in driving transparency to the CC and its role in Cardano’s governance.

Constitutional committee portal

Homepage: an overview with educational content related to:

What is the Constitution and why is it important? - with a link to the latest version of the Constitution

What is the Constitutional Committee and why is it important? - with a link to the Constitutional Committee members page

Provide a digital space for the future Cardano Constitution as a reference for the Constitutional Committee and Cardano community as a whole.

Establish a mechanism that provides a hash of the last version of the Constitution for verification, along with a mechanism to view historical changes to the Constitution, with appropriate links and the date when the changes were made.

Provide a mechanism to publish the conclusions and rationale behind Constitutional Committee votes, with reference to specific Articles of this Constitution that are in conflict with a given proposal, in case of rejection. 

The portal should track live governance actions and intuitively show how the CC voted providing also an option for Constitutional Committee members to expand on their ration

Usability
The Constitutional Committee Portal should be accessible to non-technical users

Constitutional Committee Portal should be transparent and easy to engage

Meet WCAG 3.0 AA standards for accessibility

Development needs to include i18n standards for internationalization



Each publication should have a unique identifier for ease of reference. 

Provide a mechanism to generate vote metadata anchors from the off-chain the conclusions and rationale which can then be submitted on-chain alongside the vote.

A public profile to identify Constitutional Committee members and their on-chain credentials.

A space to identify historic Constitutional Committee members, along with information related to the period that they served.

Any other feature that would improve the quality of interaction between the Constitutional Committee and other stakeholders of Cardano governance. Be creative!  

Intersect Community Grants

Intersect is a member-based organization for the Cardano ecosystem

Intersect is a member-based organization for the Cardano ecosystem tasked with ensuring its continuity and future development. Bringing members together behind a shared vision, Intersect enables a more resilient, secure, transparent, and innovative Cardano ecosystem that puts members in the driving seat of Cardano’s future.

Intersect's five pillars
At its core, Intersect will focus on ensuring, through its members, the future maintenance and development of Cardano. As a community governed blockchain, this means caring about both the technology and processes that enable technical progress and consensus through discourse and collaboration.

Intersect has five pillars:

1. Support the community to develop the ecosystem by hosting developer-focused conferences, hackathons, and events.

2. Administrate and champion Cardano’s community-led governance implemented by CIP 1694.

3. Orchestrate delivery of the community approved Cardano Technical Roadmap.

4. Facilitate the continuity of Cardano for system stability.

5. Coordinate open source development of core technologies for Cardano.

Intersect is a member-based organization for the Cardano ecosystem

What is Intersect

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