Cardano Opens a Structured Path for Constitutional Amendments

Intersect has opened the Constitutional Amendment Portal, or CAP, for alpha testing, introducing a structured environment for proposing changes to the Cardano Constitution.

The portal addresses a gap that remained after Cardano established its constitutional and on-chain governance framework.

Constitutional amendments could ultimately be submitted through governance actions, but there was no dedicated process for developing the wording, gathering feedback and refining a proposal before it reached that stage.

How the CAP Portal Works

The CAP Portal places the Cardano Constitution and the tools for proposing changes in the same environment.

Users can select a specific passage of the Constitution, propose replacement or additional language, explain the reasoning behind the change and preview how the amended section would read. A completed submission becomes a Constitutional Amendment Proposal, or CAP.

The portal also supports Constitutional Issue Statements, or CIS, for cases where a participant identifies an ambiguity, gap or other issue but does not yet have specific amendment language to propose.

Proposals remain publicly connected to their discussions and can progress through consultation, ready and done stages. The model is designed to keep the amendment text, rationale and community deliberation attached to the same proposal.

Participation is tied to Cardano rather than a conventional account system. Users can connect a CIP-30 compatible wallet and select a username, while their stake address serves as their identity. No email address or password is required.

Intersect said the idea behind the portal first took shape in October 2025. Its development involved the Civics Committee and Constitutional Amendments working group, with participation from Input Output, the Cardano Foundation, Intersect, the Constitutional Committee, DReps, stake pool operators, constitutional delegates and community members.

From CAP Proposal to On-Chain Governance

CAP operates as an off-chain consultation and drafting layer. Publishing a proposal in the portal does not amend the Cardano Constitution or automatically create an on-chain governance action.

A constitutional proposal that moves beyond this process must still be separately submitted on-chain as the relevant governance action.

Under Cardano’s current governance parameters, submitting a governance action requires a 100,000 ADA deposit. For a new constitution or guardrails script action, ratification requires a two-thirds Constitutional Committee threshold and approval from 75% of active DRep voting stake. Stake pool operators do not vote on this type of governance action.

The governance action deposit is returned to the proposer’s designated reward account after the action leaves its live state.

This separates two parts of the constitutional process. CAP provides an environment for developing and discussing the proposal, while Cardano’s existing governance system determines whether the resulting constitutional action is approved and enacted.

Cardano’s First CAP Proposals Enter Consultation

The alpha portal has already started receiving submissions.

Four items were publicly visible in the consultation stage on August 8. The first was CAP #1, titled “Require Milestone-Based Treasury Disbursement and Return of Undistributed…” A second proposal, CAP #2, seeks to remove Article II, Section 7.4 of the Constitution.

CAP #3 proposes to “Evolve the Net Change Limit into a Strategic Spending Plan,” while CIS #4 raises what its author describes as the “Bundling” problem.

The portal remains an alpha product, and Intersect is seeking feedback while its workflow and user experience are still being developed. The early submissions provide the first live examples of how constitutional issues and proposed amendments can move through the consultation system.

CAP does not change Cardano’s constitutional voting thresholds or bypass its on-chain governance. It adds a public drafting and consultation layer before those thresholds come into play, giving proposed amendments a defined place to develop before someone commits the 100,000 ADA deposit required to submit the corresponding governance action on-chain.