Cardano Governance: Applied
Register as a DRep, draft a proposal, and cast a vote using GovTool on the Preview testnet
Cardano's governance system asks a lot of its participants: that a global, pseudonymous community can make coherent decisions about a complex technological and economic system. This course is the sequel to Introduction to Cardano Governance, built for learners who already understand the theory and are ready to do the work themselves. Using the Preview testnet and its companion GovTool instance, learners configure a wallet, register as a DRep, draft and submit a governance action, and vote, tracking a single proposal through community discussion, ratification, and enactment. Across 23 compact units, the course is anchored by a demonstration case study, an Info Action asking whether Cardano should establish a Sovereign Wealth Fund, produced against the ratified Cardano Constitution v2.4.
Course overview
Configure a Cardano wallet for the Preview testnet, obtain test ada from the faucet, and connect a CIP-95 compatible wallet to GovTool.
Register as a DRep, including the 500 tADA refundable deposit, immutable metadata hosting under CIP-100 and CIP-108, and the drepActivity parameter that governs active status.
Choose between delegating to a named DRep, Auto Abstain, and No Confidence based on an informed read of the DRep directory.
Identify the appropriate governance action type for a given policy question, distinguishing non-binding Info Actions from binding action types.
Draft, immutably host, and submit an Info Action proposal that meets CIP-108 and the Article II(6) requirements of the Cardano Constitution.
Cast a vote with rationale and correctly interpret a live tally, distinguishing a "No" vote, an explicit "Abstain," and silence.
Trace a governance action through ratification and enactment, including the two-epoch boundary lag and the guardrails script for Parameter Change submissions.