Cardano Governance
Shape the future of Cardano. Participate in governance and have your voice heard on the network's direction, applications, and growth.
Cardano’s decentralized and community-driven governance ensures stakeholders make collective, transparent network decisions.
Empowering active participation with immutable, on-chain voting.
Cardano governance enables the community to influence blockchain development through treasury withdrawals, parameter changes, and other governance actions.
Governance actions require approval from at least two of the three governance roles: Delegated Representatives (DReps), Stake Pool Operators (SPOs), and the Constitutional Committee (CC), ensuring fairness and transparency.
Decentralized governance strengthens Cardano’s security and resilience by distributing decision-making power, reducing single points of failure, and ensuring network stability.
As a registered Delegated Representative (DRep), the Cardano Foundation participates in governance following the Ethos and Principles defined in ‘Our Cardano'.
The Cardano Foundation served on the Interim Constitutional Committee (ICC) from September 2024 to September 2025, ensuring governance actions aligned with the Cardano Constitution while maintaining neutrality and transparency.
Anyone can participate in discussions about Cardano’s constitution, it's budget, the role of delegated representatives, the Parameter Committee, and many other topics.
The Cardano Foundation actively distributes voting power by delegating more than 300 million ada to over 15 community Delegated Representatives (DReps) across Builder, Adoption, and Operation categories.
Empowering Community DReps: Our Strategy
As part of the Cardano Foundation’s commitment to a resilient and decentralized governance system, we are delegating a total of 260 million ada to 13 community DReps (approximately 20 million ada each). These delegations come without any specific expectations regarding voting outcomes. We looked at the DReps track records and cast our trust in their proofs of independent, sound decision-making.
By empowering diverse voices, we aim to ensure that the people driving Cardano forward have sufficient standing to participate actively in the network and shape its future.
The Three Delegation Categories
To ensure robust and diverse representation, we use a DRep Selection Matrix that carefully assesses and selects DReps across three critical pillars:
Empowers the developers, open-source teams, and technical contributors who spend their days building on and advancing the Cardano blockchain.
Represents the voices driving utility, establishing real-world use cases, and onboarding new users and enterprises into the ecosystem.
Accountability & Reallocation
To prevent ecosystem stagnation and promote healthy delegation rotation, these delegations are continuously evaluated. We monitor key metrics, including voting participation rates, the consistent provision of public voting rationales, power impact ratios, and strategic alignment with broader ecosystem priorities.
Social-impact DAO championing Extended Quadratic Funding on Cardano.
Solo analyst running the ChangWatch governance dashboard and highly engaged in multiple CIPs.
CEO of DripDropz, a Cardano rewards-distribution layer.
Co-founder leading the push for Dingo a Go-based client implementation and open-source infrastructure.
Understanding governance actions
Cardano’s governance decisions involve seven action types, including Protocol Parameter Changes, Treasury Withdrawals, and Hard Fork Initiations. At least two of the three governance roles (DReps, SPOs, and CC) must approve an action. The Cardano Foundation is committed to voting on all governance actions and providing a detailed rationale. Below is an overview of our recent voting activity.
- DRep ID: drep1ydpfkyjxzeqvalf6fgvj7lznrk8kcmfnvy9hyl6gr6ez6wgsjaelx
Governance deliberations: meeting notes
The Governance Advisory Team, consisting of subject-matter experts, regularly reviews governance actions and advises on decision-making. To maintain transparency, we publish meeting notes summarizing key discussions and decisions.
Our Cardano
Our Cardano outlines the Ethos and Principles that guide the Cardano Foundation’s participation in governance, ensuring transparency, accountability, and responsible stewardship in fostering a thriving, decentralized ecosystem.
How we make governance decisions
The Cardano Foundation has established a Governance Advisory Team, consisting of subject-matter experts, to evaluate governance proposals based on constitutional alignment and governance merit. The process follows these steps:
Governance action intake
Governance Action details are recorded on the Foundation’s Jira Kanban board, and Advisory Team members are notified.
Initial assessment
The Advisory Team assesses clarity, potential impact, and criticality of the action and requests input from relevant subject-matter experts (SMEs).
Full review
The Advisory Team conducts an in-depth review, including a governance impact assessment (as a DRep).
Advisory team recommendation
The Advisory Team votes on the Governance Action.
Rationale drafting
A voting rationale is drafted, considering the Cardano Foundation strategy and Our Cardano.
Executive committee review
The Executive Committee reviews and finalizes the rationale.
On-chain vote submission
The vote is submitted on-chain, with metadata including the rationale behind the decision.
Our role in Cardano governance
With the primary goal of making governance processes not just transparent but easier to understand, the Cardano Foundation put together 14 downloadable flow charts that demonstrate the voting process for various governance actions.
The Cardano Foundation co-authored the first draft of CIP-1694, proposing a comprehensive revision to Cardano’s on-chain governance system. Beginning with a workshop in Colorado, the Foundation played a leading role in CIP-1694 workshops took place around the world, from Zug to Tokyo, to align stakeholders on governance priorities. Over 20 additional community meetings were supported worldwide, demonstrating the Foundation’s dedication to advancing decentralized governance.
The Cardano Foundation joined Intersect as an enterprise member, actively contributing to committees and working groups, including Civics, the Technical Steering Committee, and the Budget Committee. These roles reinforce the Foundation’s commitment to a collaborative, decentralized approach to governance.
Leveraging blockchain’s transparent and immutable records, the Cardano Foundation put together a poll experiment to help usher in the age of Voltaire, Cardano’s governance phase. The on-chain poll, based on CIP-0094 and in line with CIP-1694’s consensus-based approach to resilient governance, sought stake-weighted opinions on potential network changes. It invited the participation of all stake pool operators (SPOs) to test the system's viability and transparency, starting with a PreProd Testnet run followed by a Mainnet one. Stake delegators also had the opportunity to influence future votes by adjusting their delegation in reaction to their SPO’s vote. The results informed recommendations to IOG and EMURGO, as well as the Foundation itself.
Fair elections require casting and verifying votes in a secure manner. The Foundation created the Cardano Ballot as an application for free, user-based voting. It gave the community a voice in the agenda and awards of the Cardano Summit 2022. In 2023, the Ballot evolved to offer bespoke user interfaces and stake-based voting. The Ballot also supported CIP-1694 pre-ratification events, a stake-based temperature check for the minimal viable on-chain governance model. Over 700 stake-based votes were cast during the 2023 pre-ratification event.
The Foundation hosted constitutional workshops in Berlin, Vienna, and Taipei and actively participated in many more, bringing together community members to shape Cardano’s governance principles and refine its constitution. These workshops fostered collaboration across the ecosystem and created actionable outputs for the constitutional drafting process.
The Cardano Foundation published Our Cardano, a foundational document outlining the Ethos and Principles that guide its approach to governance. This publication provides transparency, accountability, and serves as a model for other ecosystem participants.