Open for voting Cardano Treasury Withdrawal Proposals

In September 2024, only weeks after the Chang hard fork to introduce on-chain governance, an Info governance action titled Cardanoの生きがい - Ikigai - was submitted. This was only a symbolic governance action, as it simply asked the community whether they agreed with a statement thanking those that helped get Cardano to this point and expressing a sense of hope for the future. Unfortunately, due to a bug in the code of the Cardano node that permitted an unregistered stake key to be used in the governance action, the submitter was unable to recover their deposit of 100K ADA. While the community expressed at the time the importance of reimbursing this deposit via a treasury withdrawal; once the ability to do so became available, following the Plomin hard fork; unfortunately none of the entity based budget submissions included it. The Cardano in Oceania initiative did include the deposit reimbursement in their budget Info governance action, however their governance action was not approved. This governance action therefore aims to resolve this outstanding issue.

Cardano is approaching consequential decisions about governance incentives without a shared evidence base for determining which mechanisms work, what they cost, or who should remain accountable for their outcomes. The project separates evidence-based validation from governance legitimacy: candidate incentive mechanisms will first be evaluated through research, data, modeling, and evidence, and then presented to governance for a decision on adoption. Significant work already exists across Cardano on governance compensation, participation, rationale incentives, reward distribution, voting-power concentration, and governance reward design. The Governance Incentives Working Group has already created a mapping document identifying 49 relevant efforts, proposals, research papers, tools, and related initiatives across this space [1]. This includes work developed through CPS-0020 [2], as well as CPS-0033 [3], CIP-0149 [4], Beyond MVG [6], formal reward-scheme research [7], process-first DRep compensation research [8], and Input Output Research’s Cardano Vision 2026 work [9]. The project will consider these existing ideas and approaches, examine their assumptions, advantages, disadvantages, and potential unintended effects, and combine them with further research, governance data, modeling, controlled testing, and community input to build research-backed community consensus around the most suitable governance incentive models for Cardano. The result will be a practical Governance Incentives Framework, public dataset and dashboard, documented model and formula outputs, research publications, findings from a controlled incentive pilot, and a governance integration pathway. This directly supports Cardano 2030 Pillar 3 and, through its research and data infrastructure, Pillar 1.