Overview
Cardano Foundation Governance is the public record of how the Cardano Foundation votes on governance actions, and why. It sets out which proposals the Foundation backed, opposed, or abstained on, the written argument behind each position, and the notes from the meetings where those positions were formed. It also documents how the Foundation hands a share of its voting power to community representatives instead of casting that whole stake itself.
Cardano settles protocol decisions through on-chain governance, where proposals are voted on and the result is recorded on the blockchain itself. Three groups take part: delegated representatives, known as DReps, who vote on behalf of the ADA holders who choose them; the stake pool operators who run the network; and a Constitutional Committee that checks proposals against Cardano's constitution1. The Cardano Foundation, the Swiss foundation that supports the network, votes as a registered DRep, and it served on the interim Constitutional Committee from September 2024 to September 20252.
Key Features
- Find out why a vote went the way it did. The Cardano Foundation drafts a written rationale before voting and records a link to that rationale, plus a hash of the document, on the blockchain with the vote2.
- Read the deliberation, not only the decision. Governance Advisory Team meeting notes go into a public repository as dated files3, each carrying a named attendee list and the team's reasoning on the proposals it reviewed4.
- Follow voting power as it moves to the community. The Foundation delegates blocks of its ADA to community DReps sorted into Builder, Adoption, and Operations groups, chosen through a published selection matrix2.
- Check votes against a published standard. Our Cardano, the Foundation's written statement of its ethos and principles5, is the rubric each rationale is drafted against2.
- See how a decision gets made. Seven steps carry a proposal from intake on an internal task board, through expert input and an advisory team vote, to the executive committee finalizing the rationale2.
What to Expect
The page opens as an explainer. It walks through the three governance roles and the kinds of action they decide on, so a reader arriving with no background can get oriented before the Foundation's own record begins2.
Then it turns into a record. A table lists governance actions the Foundation voted on and the decision it reached on each. The page also shows a DRep identifier. The page carries summaries of advisory meetings, each linking through to the full note2.
Anyone who wants to go further will find the Foundation's public governance repository holds more than the page shows6. It keeps the dated archive of meeting notes, a rationale document paired with each published vote, most of them published as both a machine-readable file and a PDF7, and the DRep registration metadata that publishes the objectives the Foundation asks to be judged on8.
ADA holders who want to act on any of this can see which DReps the Foundation delegates to and delegate their own stake the same way. The delegation program states that recipients take on no obligation to vote a particular way, and that selection favors representatives who do not already hold much voting power9. The Foundation also publishes a voting tool for casting governance votes10.
