Cardano governance glossary
22 terms you will meet reading a governance action or a DRep profile, each defined in one sentence and then explained.
- Abstain
- A vote that removes your voting power from the threshold calculation rather than opposing.
- Bech32
- The address encoding Cardano uses — the reason DRep IDs look like drep1… strings.
- Cardano Constitution
- The founding document that defines the limits within which Cardano governance operates.
- Cardano treasury
- The on-chain pool of ADA funded by transaction fees and monetary expansion, spent only through governance.
- Chang hard fork
- The Cardano upgrade that activated on-chain governance and brought DReps into existence.
- CIP-1694
- The Cardano Improvement Proposal that introduced on-chain governance, creating DReps and the Constitutional Committee.
- Constitutional Committee
- The body that judges whether a governance action complies with the Cardano Constitution.
- Delegation
- Assigning either your stake to a pool or your voting power to a DRep — two separate, independent choices.
- DRep
- A delegated representative who votes on Cardano governance actions using ADA voting power delegated to them by holders.
- Enactment
- The epoch in which a ratified governance action actually takes effect on-chain.
- Epoch
- A five-day period on Cardano, the unit governance timing is measured in.
- Expiry
- When a governance action reaches the end of its voting period without being ratified.
- Governance action
- A formal on-chain proposal put to a vote by DReps, stake pool operators and the Constitutional Committee.
- Hard fork initiation
- A governance action that moves Cardano to a new major protocol version.
- Info action
- A non-binding governance action used to record community sentiment on a question.
- Lovelace
- The smallest unit of ADA — one ADA is 1,000,000 lovelace.
- No Confidence
- A standing vote against the current Constitutional Committee, available as a delegation target.
- Parameter change
- A governance action that adjusts a Cardano protocol parameter such as fees, deposits or thresholds.
- Ratification
- The point at which a governance action has met its voting thresholds and is approved.
- Stake address
- The part of a Cardano wallet that holds delegation choices and accrues rewards.
- Treasury withdrawal
- A governance action requesting ADA from the Cardano treasury to fund a project or organisation.
- Voting power
- The amount of ADA behind a vote, measured from the stake address that delegated it.