Intersect Development Update #52 March 7th

Welcome to Intersect development update number 52. We take a look at the continued conversation around the governance and budget process following our members’ and broader community feedback. We also have updates to the committee election timeline, community hub events, delivery assurance milestones, and a new version of GovTool! Let’s dive in!

Governance and budget process: continuing the conversation

Over the past few weeks, discussions surrounding governance, budgeting, and decision-making within the Cardano ecosystem have continued to develop. The feedback gathered so far has underscored the need for refinement, clarity, and alignment with community expectations and long-term sustainability.

Cardano’s budget process is new and evolving, and we recognize that the first year will not be perfect. There have been challenges; at times, the process has been more complex than necessary. Based on community feedback and the governing board requesting changes, we are making, and will continue to make, necessary adjustments, including:

• Gaining consensus on Cardano product funding priorities via the product roadmap
• Intersect committees supporting the Cardano community and DReps with their perspectives on funding priorities in addition to the product roadmap
• An open call for proposals from anyone seeking treasury funding for projects or programs
• The Cardano community via DReps making the final determination of which proposals to include in the budget(s)

These changes prioritize decision making by the community to ensure that critical funding reaches the right initiatives at the right time.

The community - through DReps and the constitutional committee - remains the ultimate decision-maker on how and when Treasury funds are allocated. Intersect’s role is to support, advise, and provide administrative oversight, ensuring the process is structured, fair, and aligned with community priorities. This recalibrated approach aims to make participation more accessible, removing unnecessary complexity and barriers to participation while maintaining accountability and strategic focus.

We deeply appreciate the 100+ members who have actively contributed to shaping this process. We continue to learn, adapt, and commit to getting this right. As we move forward, we will continue to listen, refine, and improve, ensuring that the community remains at the heart of Cardano’s budget and governance process - Read more here

Committee elections: update on timing

As part of the ongoing evolution of governance structures, the upcoming committee elections remain crucial in ensuring community-driven decision-making within the ecosystem.

We previously outlined an expected timeline for these elections, and we are committed to running a transparent and well-structured process. However, given the recent governance discussions and the need to communicate key updates on the budget framework, we are currently reviewing the timing to ensure that participants have full clarity before making decisions about standing for election.

Next week, we will engage with the Intersect steering committee (ISC) to assess whether a short adjustment to the election schedule would be beneficial, ensuring the community has the necessary information to make informed choices. We will provide an update as soon as a final decision has been reached.

As always, we appreciate the community’s engagement in shaping these processes and will continue to share updates as governance discussions progress.

Community hubs?

Last week, our Sri Lanka hub, led by CoinCeylon, held the first inter-regional hub town hall with 110 participants.

The event brought together Cardano community hubs from Africa, LATAM, Europe, Japan, North America, and Sri Lanka for the first time, fostering global collaboration and knowledge-sharing. Leaders from across regions shared key updates, challenges, and plans for 2025, highlighting the importance of decentralized governance and community-driven growth. This event marked a major step in strengthening global hub coordination, ensuring greater impact and engagement in the Cardano ecosystem. You can watch the recording here.

This week, our community hubs are hosting the following events:

Japan hub

• X Space to be held on March 7 at noon UTC. The link to join is here.

Africa hub, led by WADA

• The WADA forum monthly meeting took place on March 6, with 57 attendees. Discussions focussed on Intersect changing the budget approval process to include more community input! Catch key insights and discussions from panelists, including Lloyd Duhon, Lawrence Clarke, Nick Cook, and Kavinda Kariyapperuma. You can watch the recording here.

North America hub, led by AWEN

• North America Hub Town Hall was held on March 6, with 248 attendees. In this session, there were discussions around Cardano's DeFi surge with stablecoins and a new budget proposal for stablecoin liquidity reserve with native Cardano stablecoins. Pi of SundaeSwap came on to discuss the exclusive news that their stableswap contracts are complete and entering into the audit phase shortly. We had a good discussion with Optim Finance and some community members of ESCO and $shaggyrax.

Sri lanka hub, led by CoinCeylon

• Our Sri Lanka hub kicked off its workshop series at the University of Kelaniya this week. The first workshop was titled: ‘Mastering Blockchain Technology and Building on Cardano: From Fundamentals to Real-World Applications.’ The event was organized with the support of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science at the university. It was a great success, with 81 students in attendance. The session covered blockchain fundamentals, Cardano’s architecture, real-world applications and getting involved with Intersect, sparking insightful discussions and strong engagement. This marks the beginning of an exciting learning journey that will run for a month till April, as the Sri Lanka hub continues to empower the next generation of blockchain innovators in Sri Lanka. You can watch a recap of the event here.

• Our Sri Lanka hub also held an introductory ‘Blockchain Technology and Building on Cardano’ workshop at the University of Ruhuna, one of the largest government universities in Sri Lanka. The event saw an impressive turnout, with 194 students in attendance! It was organized in association with the IEEE Computer Society of the University. The session covered blockchain fundamentals, Cardano’s ecosystem, real-world applications, Intersect, and on-chain governance, sparking curiosity and enthusiasm among the students.

To keep up to date with the Sri Lanka hub’s university workshops, make sure to follow their X account.

Finally, you can view the community hub stats below:

Delivery assurance

Intersect's delivery assurance function, steered by the technical steering committee (TSC), ensures timely and reliable delivery of projects and services. It focuses on managing risks, monitoring progress, and promoting transparency to the community.

This week, the following milestones have been achieved:

Lido Nation - milestone 3: hifi mockup using GovTool design system and user testing

“What happens to a governance action when voting closes or it expires? Check out the new outcomes section of GovTool to see and explore these governance actions.”?

GitHub pull request to GovTool: https://github.com/IntersectMBO/govtool/pull/2918

Lido preview environment:

https://outcomes-preview.1694.io/outcomes?sort=newestFirst

Lido mainnet environment:

https://outcomes.1694.io/outcomes?sort=newestFirst?

Milestone 4: MVP 1 development of outcomes pillar is deployed to preview network

“The goal of the outcomes feature in GovTool is to help Cardano citizens understand the outcomes of governance actions.

This milestone brings a new outcomes menu to the preview network for final testing and a window for feedback before the mainnet release.

With this release, the public can now engage with proposals that are no longer on the ballot. We would love to hear if questions about the outcomes of governance actions are being answered. What’s missing?”

Outcomes open source library:

https://github.com/IntersectMBO/govtool-outcomes-pillar

Outcomes npm package:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/@intersect.mbo/govtool-outcomes-pillar-ui?

(Please note, this is now live on Gov.tools as of March 5, 2025. The information shared above is reflective of work completed against Milestone 4).

We Deliver IT - milestone 1 - maintainers role (month 1 - January)

‘In January 2025, we focused on ensuring platform stability by addressing critical bugs and improving system robustness in preparation for the upcoming Plomin hard fork. This milestone centered on refining governance tooling, enhancing proposal categorization, and resolving formatting inconsistencies to improve user experience and data integrity.

Key achievements include fixing issues related to the incorrect grouping and categorization of proposals by governance action type, ensuring accurate classification for better accessibility. Additionally, markdown styling inconsistencies in proposal formatting were corrected to enhance readability. A critical search field bug affecting DRep, governance action, and proposal searches – caused by trailing spaces – was identified and successfully resolved. These improvements collectively strengthen the governance platform, ensuring a more reliable and user-friendly system.’

https://github.com/IntersectMBO/govtool/issues/2835

https://github.com/IntersectMBO/govtool/issues/2832

https://github.com/IntersectMBO/govtool/issues/2651

https://github.com/IntersectMBO/govtool/issues/2472

Versions (0.5.7 / 0.5.8 / 0.5.9 / 0.5.10/ 0.5.11):

https://www.npmjs.com/package/@intersect.mbo/pdf-ui?activeTab=versions

Governance tooling

GovTool —A new version of GovTool has been released to the mainnet. It now allows you to see the governance actions at the last stage of their lifecycle that have expired, been enacted or not enacted, or been ratified or not ratified. After winning the grant last year, the great Lido Nation team executed the work well.

At the moment, we can proudly say that GovTool, as an open-source tool, is being built and maintained by four different builder teams: Byron, DQuadrant, Lido Nation, and We Deliver.

In the following period, you can expect further adjustments to the governance action outcomes pillar, support for the off-chain discussion, submission to the chain for voting for the remaining proposals and governance action types (hard fork, protocol parameters, update committee), and proposal discussion moderation.

Governance in numbers

As we press ahead following Plomin, follow the progress of governance actions on-chain here every week. Since Friday, February 28, 2025:?

• We've advanced from epoch 542 to epoch 544
• Unique delegators increased by 6544 (129,636 -> 136,180)
• The total number of vote delegations increased by 8016 (143,378 -> 151,394)
• Total DRep votes increased by 128 (1390 -> 1518)
• The total number of DRep registrations increased by 32 (1126 -> 1158)
• DReps who have attached metadata increased by 7 (701 -> 708)

To learn how to start using Cardano GovTool, explore GovTool documentation. Here, you'll find everything from step-by-step guides to detailed explanations of its features.

On the Intersect Discord server, you can connect to the core maintainers of governance tools via the new request and new help & support channels under Core Governance Tools in Discord.?

Governance tools working group

This week's session covered the latest updates on GovTool and the CC Portal, including the full implementation of all governance action lifecycle stages and the removal of interim constitution references. Discussions focused on integrating a proposal parameter validation tool prototype, CIP-119 image tagging, API access improvements, metadata integration issues, and additional GovTool enhancements. Several previous decisions, including CIP-119 image support and metadata validation optimizations, are in progress.

GovTool is fully open source and maintained by Intersect members. The working group continues to invite community members to participate in discussions and feature development for the Cardano GovTool. All feedback is welcome (see guide on feedback), and ongoing conversations are held in the? wg-governance-tools Discord channel, where new feature ideas are regularly triaged and implemented.

• Do you want to catch up with the latest happenings with the Cardano budget, constitution, and hard forks? This page is for you!
• Intersect knowledge base - Our knowledge base, which is frequently updated, provides granular detail on our internal governance structure, committees and working groups, funding opportunities, and other topics.
• Intersect website - the latest news, roadmap, and more.
• GovTool - take part in testing governance actions on the SanchoNet testnet.
• Intersect events calendar - keep up-to-date with all events Intersect hosts, such as working group and committee meetings, X spaces, and more.
• Support - Please always use your membership email address and contact Intersect for support with any application errors, login issues, or questions without answers.
• Social: Join our lively community and interact with committees, working groups, and other members on Discord. We are also continually active on Twitter (X) and LinkedIn, so follow us there to stay updated on our latest news and insights.
• Are you interested in joining the team? We’re looking for a Finance Lead and Social Media and Content manager. Read more and apply today!

Well, that’s it for this week's update. Thanks for reading!

Finally, we’d like to hear more from you about subjects important to you, such as Cardano’s governance. Your ideas and suggestions are crucial to us. If you have any questions, ideas, or suggestions, please get in touch via email, X, or LinkedIn.