Overview
Cardano GovScope is a dashboard that shows how voting power is spread across the groups that vote on network decisions. It estimates how many voting positions each type of proposal would need to pass, such as withdrawing treasury funds or starting a hard fork (a network-wide software upgrade). The figures are presented as estimates, with notes on method and limits beside the charts1.
Cardano GovScope tracks Cardano's governance system, where three groups vote on proposals: DReps (delegated representatives that ADA holders choose to vote for them), stake pool operators (the people who run the servers that produce blocks), and the Constitutional Committee (a small panel that checks proposals against the Cardano constitution)2. The site was previously called ChangWatch, and its code is public on GitHub3. Its builder, Cerkoryn, is a registered DRep4. The cardano.org app catalog lists Cardano GovScope among its governance apps5, and Essential Cardano included it under the old name in a guide to governance tools6.
Key Features
- See how concentrated stake pool power is. A chart and full table count how many identified stake pool operator groups together hold 51% of delegated stake, using group data from Balance Analytics1.
- Votes needed for each proposal type. Cards for each kind of proposal, such as electing a committee, updating the constitution, changing protocol parameters (the network's adjustable settings), or withdrawing treasury funds, estimate how many voting positions each group needs to reach its approval threshold1.
- Participation at a glance. Headline figures summarize how much ADA is delegated to DReps and to stake pools, along with how many registered DReps are active1.
- A "what if" view for inactive representatives. A toggle adds inactive DReps back into the calculation, showing how the numbers would shift if those representatives returned to voting3.
- Daily data with visible freshness. Two separate automated jobs refresh the data once a day from Koios, a public Cardano data service, and Balance Analytics, and the page marks any snapshot older than 36 hours as stale3.
What to Expect
The whole Cardano GovScope dashboard sits on one page. Headline figures come first, then the stake concentration chart, then a card for each proposal type grouped by subject: the committee, the constitution, protocol settings, hard forks, and the treasury1.
For delegators and DReps, the threshold cards answer a practical question: which groups must approve this kind of proposal, and roughly how many voting positions does that take? Expandable "Methodology and limitations" panels spell out the assumptions. The estimates assume that voters outside the group counted toward approval cast a vote rather than abstaining, and they count voting positions rather than people, since one entity can hold several roles1.
Researchers and developers can go further in the project's README, which explains how each figure is calculated, links the Conway ledger rules (the Cardano ledger code, including the rules for when a governance proposal has enough votes to pass) that the math follows, and describes the data pipeline3. The Refresh data button rereads the latest published snapshot rather than starting a new data pull3. The numbers move as delegation shifts, and the page footer shows when the data was last refreshed and which service supplied each part1.
Readers who want profiles of individual representatives will find them in DRep explorers. Cardano GovScope looks at the system as a whole instead.
