Overview
The Cardano Delegation Observatory is a free website that shows who holds voting power in Cardano governance and how they use it. Its main page lists the 30 DReps (delegated representatives, people who vote on proposals for the ADA holders who choose them) with the most voting weight, and shows how that weight has changed over a week and a month1. The project names delegators checking a representative, DReps reviewing their own record, and researchers or journalists looking for source data as its audience2.
The site is run by cryptoleo79, an independent Cardano stake pool operator and DRep2. It belongs to asy.life, a small set of open tools that record the governance, treasury, projects and funding history of the Cardano ecosystem3. Its DRep, governance and treasury numbers come from public blockchain data, read through Koios, a community-run service that lets software query Cardano4. The whole site is bilingual, in English and Japanese3.
Key Features
- See who holds governance voting power. The leaderboard ranks the top 30 DReps by voting weight, with delegator counts, 7-day and 30-day changes, and the epoch (a five-day period on Cardano) of each DRep's last vote1.
- Follow each governance decision. The governance actions page lists the governance actions recorded on chain, each with its type, its outcome and how many DReps voted yes, no or abstain5.
- Watch the shared treasury. The treasury page charts the Cardano treasury balance across epochs and records each treasury withdrawal action with its recipient, amount and outcome6.
- Check governance health in numbers. The health page tracks DRep participation and how concentrated delegation is among the top 30 DReps, plus voting activity and treasury activity, with no scores or judgments added7.
- Verify the record yourself. The Cardano Delegation Observatory keeps Project Memory, its sourced history of each project, as an append-only record in which each entry is locked to the one before it, so any later edit shows. A short Python script on the verify page lets anyone check it8. The check covers Project Memory only: the governance and treasury figures come from on-chain snapshots instead.
What to Expect
For ADA holders choosing or checking a DRep, the main page is a single table of names and numbers. Clicking a row opens more detail, and each DRep in the snapshot has its own page with a full vote history and a 90-day chart of voting weight4. There are no accounts, no wallet connections and nothing to log into3. For DReps outside the top 30, DRep explorers cover the wider field.
The site sticks to recorded facts. It does not score, rate or predict DReps2. Its ranking follows voting weight alone, with no manual curation, and the operator's own DRep entry gets no special treatment4.
Researchers and builders can download the top 30 snapshot as CSV or JSON under CC0, a public-domain dedication that lets anyone reuse the data1. The asy.life Data Layer API, a connection point other software can read from, serves the same data as plain JSON with no API key, and each response states its source and a confidence level9. The Cardano Delegation Observatory code is open-source under the Apache 2.0 license in its public GitHub repository2.
Beyond DReps, the site keeps a small Catalyst archive of saved source pages from Project Catalyst, Cardano's community grant program, with the source and capture date of each saved page attached10.
