A Year of Participation: Reflecting on Cardano Governance in 2025

As 2025 comes to an end, we reflect on a historic year where the Cardano ecosystem collectively moved to fully decentralized governance. On-chain governance in 2025 is a story of continuous activity and rapid maturation. This year has been defined by healthy debate, critical coordination, and the successful execution of the full on-chain governance model envisioned in CIP-1694. For the Cardano Foundation, this year has been (and continues to be) about responsible distribution of voting power to ensure that "governance of the many" becomes a reality wherever possible.

Active Participation and Decentralization

We began the year coordinating the Plomin Hard Fork as part of the Intersect working group, ensuring exchanges and custodians were ready for full on-chain governance. Following this, we focused on leading by example. We completed our tenure on the Interim Constitutional Committee (ICC) in September 2025 and have acted as a DRep throughout the year, maintaining a 100% voting record in both capacities with extensive public rationales. When the Constitutional Committee election came around in September, we decided to step back and amplify community voices.

To further empower the ecosystem, we launched the Cardano Foundation DRep Delegation Program earlier this year, delegating 140 million ADA to seven Developer and Builder DReps (Tempo.vote, Sidan Lab, Mesh, Socious, Cerkoryn, Kyle Solomon, and Chris Gianelloni). An expansion of this initiative was unveiled as part of our Roadmap in September, when we revealed a further delegation of 220 million ada would be allocated to eleven selected DReps from the Adoption and Operations categories. This is currently in the final stages of preparation and details will be announced in early 2026.

Making Governance Accessible and Educated

Informed participation is the bedrock of governance. In 2025 the Cardano Foundation prioritized accessibility and education. We lowered barriers to entry by releasing a fully open-source voting tool and partnering with Griffin AI to launch the Proposal Examiner. Note: The Examiner is a beta tool to support proposal assessment, not a substitute for the people on the Constitutional Committee.

On the education front, we released comprehensive Governance Action Flow Charts to help new governance participants better understand various governance actions and we updated the Developer Portal with guides for submitting governance actions and new constitutional committee members. We brought these conversations directly to the community through Roundtable talks, X Spaces, and the Day 0 Governance Sessions at the Cardano Summit 2025, featuring 15 external speakers discussing critical topics like a multi-asset treasury and Cardano’s 2030 vision and strategy.

In late November, we announced a collaboration with Input Output, EMURGO, Intersect, and the Midnight Foundation on a new budget info action. This governance action's goal is to establish a Critical Integration Budget to strengthen the Cardano ecosystem by enabling key integrations and supporting infrastructure partners.

Collaboration with Intersect

September 2025 marked our first anniversary as an Enterprise Member of Intersect. Over the last year, our team members have been actively serving on numerous committees to drive the ecosystem forward. Just a few highlights from a busy year:

• Civics & Constitution: Nicolas Cerny (Chair, Civics Committee) has been pivotal in the Constitutional workstream, governance workshops, and establishing working groups for Governance Education, Health and the Constitutional Amendments.
• Technical Steering: Markus Gufler and Alexander Moser (TSC & Parameter Committee) have played crucial roles in ensuring network security and continuity.
• Open Source: Arnaud Baily (OSC) has supported initiatives like the retainer/maintainer program and advocated for decentralized solutions.
• Budget: Rita Mistry and Nicolas Cerny architected the transparent Cardano 2026 Budget Process alongside the Budget Committee and Intersect, with a focus on clear guidelines for all stakeholders.
• Product: Alexandre Maaza (Product Committee) and the Cardano Foundation as a whole has actively contributed to the Cardano 2030 Vision and Strategy.
• Marketing & Growth: Laura Mattiucci (Growth and Marketing Committee) successfully established the Unified Global Events Strategy and the Cardano Summit proposal.
• Oversight: The Cardano Foundation also serves on the Oversight Committee to provide data verification with respect to payments of vendor smart contracts and was heavily involved in writing the applicable rules and specifications.

The Reality of Our Decentralized Future

If 2025 has taught us anything, it is that the Cardano community tackles complex challenges with maturity, intelligence, unity and passion. Governance is a journey, it can be messy and loud, but it is undeniably ours. The Cardano Foundation is proud to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Cardano community as we continue to build a robust, decentralized future together.

Let’s keep building. Let’s keep voting. Let’s keep pushing Cardano forward.