Updated Govtool Budget Proposal - long version
Cardano’s open-source tool for the community to contribute to governance: Cardano Govtool
Last updated
Cardano’s open-source tool for the community to contribute to governance: Cardano Govtool
Last updated
Budget category: Governance Support
With the implementation of and the dawn of the, the community now has the power to shape the network’s future through on-chain governance. But power without access is meaningless. For on-chain governance to be effective, it requires participation. To enable and facilitate meaningful participation, a simple and consolidated user experience is key to allow Ada holders, new and existing, to get informed, onboarded, delegate to DReps (or become DReps), discuss and create new governance actions, see/vote on governance actions,and see outcomes of the whole process.
For the public good, it is also key for the Cardano community to own and maintain a set of basic tools that will always be, open-source, non-commercialized and available/accessible to foster this participation and so to keep decision making in Cardano ecosystem matters as fair, transparent and open as possible.
Without an open-source solution, we risk the productization of participation. If the core governance tools become driven by profit, access and influence could become inequitable and shaped by those that can afford to maintain or fund development, without community input. This effectively undermines the ideals of decentralized governance. Based upon these unique risks, an open-source, community owned alternative must always exist. This ensures every ada holder has equal opportunity to participate.
In this context, reliable and neutral governance tooling is not just helpful, it is essential. The community must have full confidence that the tools they rely on to participate in governance will always be available, open, and free from bias. Conversely, a closed-source voting application, controlled by a single group or enterprise, introduces risk as participants cannot independently verify its integrity or fairness. Without trusted, non-commercial, and unaffiliated tooling, decentralized governance loses its foundation.
Just as in any democratic system, if the infrastructure of participation is compromised, so too is the legitimacy of its outcomes.
The absence of GovTool, or a similar set of tools, would make effective and collaborative governance dramatically harder, riskier, and less inclusive. There is a chance of drastic reduction of participation and transparency, potentially caused by the privatization of governance tooling..
Here’s what would be lost or degraded:
Barrier to participation in Governance would be higher: Without GovTool (or a set of tools like GovTool), most actions needed to participate in governance (registering as a DRep, voting, proposing, etc.) would require use of the CLI, other technical tools, or any privately owned tool (that still needs funding). This would exclude the majority of Ada holders, particularly non-technical users who rely on the Web UI.
Fragmentation and Inconsistency: Governance is complex by nature, other tools may try to fill the gap, but the experience of inconsistency and fragmentation will become inevitable. It is a well known and tested and proven axiom of product design that simpler, integrated products make for greater participation. Fragmentation of this experience will reduce participation in real terms, making Governance an expert-only area. This is not in the spirit of Cardano, nor does it reflect the ideals of the Voltaire area. It is effectively a type of ‘voter suppression’. No single experience currently supports:
All governance action types
All Cardano networks (Preview, Preprod, Mainnet)
Full open-source contribution with test coverage and analytics
A unified experience combining discussion, submission, delegation, voting, and results
Free to use OpenAPIs
Loss of Governance On-Ramps: Without Preview and Preprod support, there would be no safe testing ground for new DReps or proposers to learn and build confidence before acting on Mainnet.
Broken Ecosystem Integrations: Projects that currently build on GovTool APIs or plan to, would lose their base infrastructure. This would stall innovation and delay community-driven tooling efforts.
Reduced Transparency and Trust: Other governance tools may be closed-source, lack visible roadmaps, or provide limited insight into their inner workings. GovTool's public analytics, code, backlog, and docs are a benchmark for accountability. Losing that would damage trust in governance tooling.
Missed Opportunity for Decentralization: GovTool is already moving toward a community-led bounty-based model. If abandoned, the Cardano community would miss the chance to create a sustainable, decentralized tooling system—and fall back into centralized or underfunded governance interfaces.
In short, without Cardano GovTool, governance could become less transparent, less accessible, and more centralized. Preserving and improving Cardano GovTool is not just a maintenance task, it is a commitment to participative, inclusive, and decentralized governance for all Ada holders.
Cardano GovTool, a set of open-source, community-owned governance tools, has been providing this support for open participation since before CIP-1694 was approved in 2023.
It first fostered adoption of wallet upgrading to the new governance standards (CIP-95/CIP-105) with its first beta version
It acted as a reference implementation for what Cardano governance tools could look like
It fostered testing and usage of SanchoNet, with the SanchoNet GovTool (used by over 30k+ unique users), which helped iteration to get to the bootstrapping phase of Cardano’s governance. It allowed community practice and familiarise with governance by submitting and voting on governance actions, registering and delegating to DReps, and informed improvements before mainnet launch. During this time, the governance tools working group, and the teams and individuals building Govtool became a focal group for other builders to connect.
Since the Chang upgrade, it opened participation during the bootstrapping phase of Governance, helping grow the DRep pool and the total ada delegated to DReps, as well as making governance clear and visible to the community, also allowing the first-ever community-led hardfork to be decided transparently on-chain. As on-chain governance matured, GovTool expanded to support all types of Governance Actions. Initially, simpler proposal types like Info Actions (non-binding information proposals) and Treasury Withdrawals were enabled for submission via the UI. These were chosen first due to their relative simplicity and broad utility. By late 2024, GovTool could render all proposal types for voting, meaning DReps could view and vote on protocol parameter changes, constitutional amendments, etc., even if submission of some complex types was pending. During this time, the first set of tools that used Govtool backend APIs started to appear, providing new and different ways for the community to interact with governance.
Since the Plomin upgrade, it has been the key benchmark reference for Cardano Governance for the community, being at the forefront in solving new hard challenges, creating reference implementations, and setting standards, allowing other community tools to provide extended value via their interfaces. The Cardano Plomin upgrade fully enabled CIP-1694 on mainnet, including on-chain governance action submission for all types of governance action. This was a turning point: “full governance” was now live on mainnet, and GovTool reached a key milestone of allowing users to experience end-to-end on-chain governance on both testnet and mainnet through a user-friendly interface. By this time GovTool had versions 1.0.24+ with significant enhancements like support for CIP-1694 identifiers, treasury withdrawals, improved Ada formatting, and better voting power calculations.
Outside of playing a crucial ecosystem role by keeping governance open and fair, Cardano GovTool does cover the full Cardano Governance process:
It allows anyone to submit a proposal, discuss it, improve it with community feedback, and submit it as a Governance Action in an easy guided process
It allows Ada holders to register as DReps, or as Direct Voters (a role introduced by GovTool to increase participation), via a step by step guided process, also allowing DReps to share their profile and campaign. Furthermore, it also allows DReps to retire when needed
It allows Ada holders to view, review and compare all DReps (tagging them appropriately if active, inactive or retired), allocating and changing delegation to them easily, enabling true liquid democracy
It allows DReps, and Direct Voters, to review and vote on governance actions, encouraging them to submit a rationale for their vote
It allows anyone to review the outcomes of the governance actions that have been submitted on-chain and easily understand the outcome and why that was the decision reached
Via the Constitutional committee Portal it allows anyone to see and search the Cardano Constitution in an accessible format, to compare different versions and track changes to the Constitution, as well as view Constitutional Committee members, their votes, and rationale.
In addition to its governance features and collaborative development model, GovTool offers unmatched infrastructure capabilities and openness that make it a foundational pillar of Cardano’s on-chain governance ecosystem.
Here’s what sets Cardano GovTool apart:
Multi-Network Support: GovTool is the only governance tool that supports Cardano’s Preview, Preprod, and Mainnet networks. This tri-network support is critical not just for developers, but for inclusive governance participation:
Preview and Preprod allow anyone to practice governance, register as a DRep, delegate, vote, or submit proposals, without risking real ada.
These testnets are not “simulations” only; they are also active protocol testbeds where Governance Actions such as protocol parameter changes can be submitted and executed, making them essential for refining governance flows before Mainnet deployment.
To ensure reliability and quality GovTool operates as a multi-environment system spanning development, QA, and live networks across all governance pillars (Voting & Delegation, Proposal Discussion Forum/Budget Proposals, and Outcomes). Each pillar is deployed and maintained separately on Dev, QA, Preview, Preprod, and Mainnet, enabling continuous development, testing, and public use.
Open APIs for All Builders: GovTool exposes fully open, well-documented APIs for accessing governance metadata, proposals, voting data, and more. These APIs are free to use and are already powering multiple third-party tools across the ecosystem. This enables:
Builders to create specialized experiences, dashboards, or governance assistants on top of GovTool’s backend.
Ecosystem diversity by reducing dependency on centralized infrastructure.
A plug-and-play model for wallets, explorers, and other apps to add governance features effortlessly.
Inclusive User Interface and Contribution Model:
For non-technical users, GovTool offers a clean, Web2-like interface that abstracts blockchain complexity and empowers anyone to participate in governance.
For builders and contributors, GovTool is:
Fully open source, with the public GitHub repositories.
Extensively documented, including API specs, contribution guides, and governance context.
Equipped with publicly available test suites for transparency and validation.
Backed by a fully open development backlog, allowing the community to propose, discuss, and prioritize features together.
Transparent and Accountable Operations:
Matomo-based usage analytics are published openly, so the community can see exactly how GovTool is being used, by whom, when, and where.
GovTool is possibly the only Cardano governance tool using Autonomous Test Agents that test Governance actions according to CIP-1694, helping ensure higher reliability, regression testing, and performance under load.
The idea by one of the development teams was to create an automated testing tool (not available on Cardano) to be able to test at scale, reduce testnet time leading to timely delivery of GovTool on mainnet. This tool known as Autonomous Agent Testing is available as open source for the developer community as a result of the GovTool project and Catalyst funding for this idea.
Full Governance Action Support (On the Way): While many tools visualize governance, GovTool is on track to become the only app that enables submission of all Governance Action types directly from the interface. Some of this is already live via backend, and full UI support is being actively developed.
GovTool’s architecture and transparency model create a unique value proposition: it is not just a tool to use, it is an infrastructure layer that invites the entire community to build, extend, audit, and improve how Cardano governs itself.
Cardano Govtool has been and remains the only fully open-source, fully community-owned set of tools to support the governing of Cardano without a commercial agenda. Via community feedback and direct decision making via the open Governance Tools working group, it keeps evolving and improving, incubates opportunities for the whole ecosystem to participate and/or build on top of it. It provides access to a variety of API endpoints that do the heavy lifting for many new governance tools to exist and provide different ways to participate in governance.
A set of truly community-owned tools to participate in the Government of our ecosystem, such as Cardano Govtool, is a critical and pivotal component of Cardano, ensuring that regardless of individual tools' decisions and support, Cardano’s governance will always be transparent and easy to access, encouraging fair and distributed governance.
In short, Cardano Govtool is like a public square where the Cardano community joins effort in defining and improving their experience for a simpler, more open and transparent government, where hard challenges get solved with the shared expertise of our ecosystem and where consolidated effort enables smaller individual contributors to multiply the value provided to the whole community.
Furthermore, this joint effort removes the heavy lifting, allowing many more individual tools to emerge, via APIs access to a complex and rich backend.
This proposal provides direct-to-users tools that allow decision-making in Cardano to progress by fostering higher participation and transparency. This includes fostering and opening participation to key decisions related, but not limited to, key parameters, roadmaps, budgets, new or updates to the constitution, and more.
Cardano GovTool has quickly become the hub for Cardano governance activity. The Cardano community has been using and taking value from the applications that make up Cardano Govtool since before CIP-1694 was approved.
Over 30k unique users have used, tested, and provided feedback over the beta testing in SanchoNet GovTool, which created a path to full governance.
Hundreds of ideas and feedback have been submitted via the open backlog stored in GitHub, showing participation in the evolution of the tool and ownership of it by the Cardano community.
The governance tools working group, which as of now has met more than 65 times, has become the focal point and trusted source of info for multiple builders in the governance space, which connect weekly to provide feedback and direction to Govtool and align on common standards.
It supported the thousands of DReps registrations and delegations (equivalent to millions of ADA)
Thousands of votes have been cast through GovTool’s interface
It hosts hundreds of proposal between the preview, preprod and mainnet instance
Govtool’s open APIs have enabled multiple community builders to provide value, such as:
Furthermore, Cardano GovTool’s fast support has enabled the Cardano community to have this Budget Proposal submission process available in record time (less than 10 working days), keeping it still open for integration via OpenAPIs.
The distributed model, which connects multiple applications in one cohesive experience, allows multiple builders and many individual participants to develop and evolve Govtool’s applications in parallel, as well as allowing anyone to take any part of GovTool as a reference implementation. This has encouraged wide positive support and participation so far.
We believe the participation, usage, and value leveraged by other tools shows clear support to continue this effort, making it more and more structured, more and more efficient, and lean as we progress.
This proposal aims to push Cardano GovTool to be truly and organically maintained by individuals in the Cardano Community, simplifying the bootstrapping model.
The Cardano GovTool has been bootstrapped by community builders, with facilitation from Intersect, to get us to full Cardano governance and ensure open and transparent participation in it.
Cardano GovTool was always meant to be organically maintained by many community contributors. The first steps towards that have been there from the start, by making it fully open source and having community test while building. Then all the steps of governance have been divided in different applications, to reduce dependencies and increase tool resilience, as well as giving more opportunities for Govtool backend to be used. Via an open grant process it has been maintained so far by 5 community builders, shaping the foundations, as well as growing and refining documentation to allow individual contributions. Furthermore, a working group has been active for over 1 year, collating community feedback and providing direction, becoming also the connection point of all the builders working on governance tools.
These give now the foundation to push Cardano GovTool a step further, reducing the need for active regular development, making that useful but not mandatory, and expanding focus on increasing organic individual contribution.
Cardano Govtool is currently made of five independent pillars:
Voting Pillar
Delegation Pillar
Proposal Discussion Pillar
Outcomes Pillar
Budget Discussions Pillar
To support these pillars, there is an overall QA for end-to-end automated testing and DevOps to manage hosting and deployments of the 3 versions (preview GovTool, pre-prod Govtool and mainnet GovTool)
This proposal offers different levels of funding. All the options are community led and operated. Every level will increase speed as well as feature improvements. These levels can be added on top of each other (level 1 can be actioned alone, to have level 2 you need level 1 as foundation, to have level 3 some or all elements of level 1 and 2 are needed). Additionally, to support decentralized development and streamline contribution workflows, we will partner with platforms like Andamio or similar to structure and distribute tasks transparently across the community.
These are the 3 different levels and what they include:
The governance body made of community members that will collate and document the direction for this open source project is currently the Governance Tools working group, but it can evolve based on the community wider direction.
The delivery and progress of Cardano GovTool are dependent on the overall support and participation from the community, making sure everyone has ownership of the tools to participate in their government. On the development side, the applications that make up Govtool are dependent on different libraries. These dependencies will be managed directly by the repo maintainers.
Cardano Govtool has already passed the hardest part, its first implementation (creating standards and processes from scratch), and it’s now running with a decentralised open source model with multiple maintainers who keep the whole experience up and running as well as adding and improving existing features.
Some key items already delivered in 2025 and in the roadmap include:
This Proposal aims to fund support for Cardano GovTool for 12 months.
Depending on the level of funding chosen by the community the amount of resources allocated will vary. The resources indicated below will be provided by community builders.
Level 1 - Foundational Basic Maintenance
Infrastructure maintenance 0.25 FTE
Repo maintainer 1 FTE QA and 1 FTE full stack engineer
Level 2 - Incentivised participation This will provide exponentially more individual contributors and so resources
Level 3 - Pillar active development and maintenance End-to-end and automated testings 1 FTE (if this level is chosen, the 1 FTE mentioned in the foundational level can either be removed or added to this effort)
Proposals Pillar 1 FTE
Delegation Pillar 1.5 FTE
Voting Pillar 1.5 FTE
Outcomes Pillar 0.75 FTE
Budget discussion Pillar 0.5 FTE
The governance body made of community members that will collate and document the direction for this open source project is currently the Governance Tools Working. This group is made of volunteers which add to the count of resources.
The Cardano GovTool has been the benchmark governance tool since the emergence of on-chain governance, the builders currently working on it have defined from scratch technical and user experience standards currently used by other governance tools. The process is facilitated with the support of IntersectMBO, its committees, and working groups.
Any team with the skills, transparency, and alignment with GovTool’s open-source mission is encouraged to participate in maintaining and advancing the project. This ensures community choice, fosters innovation, and reduces long-term dependency on a fixed set of contributors.
₳1,050,500
₳1,150,000 ($920,000 - USD to ADA Conversion Rate: 0.8) for 12 months
The funds requested cover 12 months of maintenance and improvement for 5 applications that make up GovTool. Because GovTool remains community-owned, funds will continue to be allocated via an open and transparent grant process, and also the iterations of the different applications that make up GovTool will be subject to pivoting steered directly by the Cardano Community feedback and needs.
This will be the first time these sets of tools, made as public good, will request funds to continue running. So in this first instance the existing builders, which have invested effort and have the deepest expertise and knowledge to run them, will be requesting funds directly for the next 12 months. During this first 12 months more builders and individual contributors will be onboarded via incentivised bounties, giving more options for future maintainers.
The commitment is to be efficient with funding, so any budget remaining at the end of the 12 months will be returned to the Cardano Treasury.
The budget cost breakdown is as follows:
Since full governance came live with Plomin upgrade in September 2024, the Cardano Govtool has had over 48k+ visits, over 76k+ page views in 170 countries (with the highest usage in the USA, followed United Kingdom, Japan, Canada and Germany, and then Australia, Netherlands, Vietnam, Switzerland, Spain and many more). Check open analytics at .
It has enabled ada holders to experience governance on testnet, with proposals, governance actions, DReps and delegations on and Importantly, the platform’s openness has enabled many community contributors to get involved: the governance working group reviews user feedback weekly, the GovTool GitHub repository and backlog are public, and improvements always originate from community direction.
In the open backlog
In the open discussions
The ongoing development and maintenance of GovTool requires a reliable and capable team. While current contributors, such as,,,, and, have demonstrated long-standing commitment and technical expertise in the Cardano ecosystem, future funding rounds should remain open to other qualified teams as well.
$5,000 per month for hosting costs (full cost breakdown available in the following ) including Dev, QA environments for the dev each of the pillars and Preview, PreProd and Mainnet production environments