Cardano's 2027 budget plan: seven domains with stewards, not a proposal flood
Victoria Shinder2 min readIntersect, working with the Cardano Foundation and other ecosystem stakeholders, published a proposal on 28 October for how Cardano should spend from its treasury in 2027. It calls the framework the Cardano Ecosystem Budget Process, or CEBP, and asks the community for feedback before seeking formal approval from DReps, the delegated representatives who vote on treasury withdrawals. The tentative plan is to submit an info action in the second week of November, targeting 10 November.
The diagnosis comes from two budget cycles. In 2026, the post says, DReps repeatedly complained about the volume, complexity and lack of comparability of funding requests, and the resulting information overload, combined with little expert guidance, risked misallocating capital. The CEBP aims to reduce the number of withdrawal actions DReps must review, make them comparable by tying them to a shared strategy, give every DRep access to expertise and improve accountability.
It makes three changes: clear annual objectives tied to the Cardano 2030 goals; the year's spending limit divided into seven budget categories, or domains; and, for all but one domain, a responsible facilitating institution, a steward. Stewards would outline a domain strategy, suggest a dollar cap for their domain, define how proposals are collected and assessed, submit or support proposals, and enforce delivery. The post's key principle is that facilitation does not equal gatekeeping: every spending decision, the objectives, the split between domains and the choice of stewards stay with DReps, who could also abandon the model at any time, since nothing on-chain enforces it. If approved, it would run as a trial in 2027.
What it means
The plan trades one problem for another. Fewer, better-prepared proposals would ease the load that DReps complained about, but the stewards who prepare them become the new centre of gravity: whoever writes the domain strategy and suggests the cap shapes what gets funded long before a vote. The safeguard the post offers is that DReps keep every decision and can walk away. Whether that holds in practice depends on how the stewards are chosen, which the proposal leaves to a second series of info actions.