TL;DR:
- The Cardano Foundation presented its proposal evaluation framework for the 2026 governance budget cycle.
- The system incorporates structured scoring by strategic pillars, dual independent review, and tracking of 2025 delivery history.
- Proposals surpassing 67% off-chain approval will advance to on-chain voting through Cardano network Treasury withdrawal actions.
The Cardano Foundation published the details of its new budget proposal review framework for 2026, a system designed to organize and bring transparency to the governance process that defines how funds are allocated from the network’s Treasury. The document outlines the criteria, the voting logic, and the lessons learned from the previous cycle.
The process begins when projects submit proposals through Intersect’s Hydra-voting tool. At this stage, initiatives are not formal on-chain actions but ideas subject to feedback and improvement.
Once off-chain voting concludes, proposals that surpass 67% approval advance to Treasury withdrawal actions, separated according to their level of support: between 67% and 75% in one group, and above 75% in another. If delegated representatives —DReps— vote in favor, funds are released from the Treasury and the work becomes financed.
The Evaluation Framework and Its Pillars
Each proposal is evaluated independently by at least two internal reviewers across three criteria: ecosystem growth, budget viability, and strategic alignment with the Cardano 2030 framework. Reviewers are assigned according to their area of expertise within five pillars: infrastructure and research, adoption and utility, governance, community growth, and ecosystem sustainability. In the event of disagreement between reviewers, a third party acts as a tiebreaker. Final recommendations are expressed as three possible votes: yes, no, or abstain.
One of the notable additions in the 2026 cycle is the tracking of 2025 history. Reviewers can verify whether a proposer who received funding in the previous cycle fulfilled their commitments, incorporating an accountability element that the previous process did not contemplate.
Cardano Learned Several Lessons During the First Cycle
The 2025 cycle was the first of its kind and exposed some concrete limitations: the absence of comparable evaluations, lack of domain specialization, and proposals that changed materially during the process without triggering new reviews. The current framework addresses each of those problems. Likert scales with justification text replace purely narrative evaluations, pillar-based assignment guarantees thematic expertise, and a change-detection system requires re-evaluation whenever a proposal is modified on the platform.
Cardano also announced that it will publish a follow-up article with its positions and specific reasoning on each proposal, seeking to make its role as a DRep as readable and auditable as any other actor in the ecosystem.
