Cardano Reviews Constitutional Changes to Treasury and SPO Governance

Cardano’s Constitutional Amendment Portal currently lists seven items in consultation, including five Constitutional Amendment Proposals and two Constitutional Issue Statements.

None has advanced to the Ready or Done stage, and the published texts do not change the Cardano Constitution by themselves. An amendment must still proceed through a separate onchain governance action before it becomes part of the governing framework.

Seven Constitutional Items Enter Consultation

A Constitutional Amendment Proposal, known as a CAP, proposes an exact change, clarification or addition to the Constitution. A Constitutional Issue Statement, or CIS, documents an ambiguity, procedural gap or governance risk without requiring the author to provide a completed solution.

The five active CAPs address payments linked to treasury milestones, the removal of Article II Section 7.4, an expansion of the Net Change Limit into a strategic spending plan, changes to governance metadata storage requirements and additional SPO approval for parameters that directly affect stake pool economics.

The two CIS documents focus on procedural weaknesses. One examines the bundling of multiple constitutional changes into a single decision, which can prevent participants from supporting one change while rejecting another. The second identifies the absence of a defined process for disclosing overlapping roles among DReps, stake pool operators and Constitutional Committee members.

The portal is still labeled as an alpha version under testing. Anyone can inspect proposals and discussions, while a Cardano wallet is required to submit a proposal or participate directly in the consultation.

Treasury and SPO Rules Take Center Stage

CAP-1 would introduce a common minimum standard for future Cardano treasury withdrawals. Each withdrawal action would need to specify measurable milestones, acceptance criteria, a payment schedule linked to delivery and public reporting at intervals of no more than 90 days.

Administrators would release funds after publishing evidence that an applicable milestone had been accepted. Further payments would be suspended in cases of material nonperformance or misuse, while any undistributed ADA would have to return to the treasury within 90 days of completion or termination.

The proposal permits advance payments when a governance action identifies and justifies expenses that must be paid before delivery. It would also prevent administrators from redirecting funds outside the approved purpose without a new treasury withdrawal action.

CAP-3 proposes changing the Net Change Limit from a single ceiling on treasury outflows into a broader spending plan. The same governance action would establish the maximum amount available, define high level budget categories and assign binding ADA allocations to those categories.

Every later withdrawal would need to identify its category and remain within both the total Net Change Limit and the amount assigned to that category. DReps would determine the categories and allocations for each period rather than fixing them permanently in the Constitution.

The draft includes a threshold of at least 67 percent of active DRep voting stake for approving a Net Change Limit. It also proposes preventing the limit from being replaced during at least half of its defined lifetime. The author has separated those safeguards from the core category model, allowing the percentages to be changed or removed without discarding the broader structure.

CAP-10 addresses minPoolCost, poolPledgeInfluence and stakePoolTargetNum. Changes to those parameters would retain the applicable DRep threshold but would also require approval from more than 50 percent of active block production stake represented by SPOs.

The proposal does not give stake pool operators unilateral control over economic parameters or require their approval for every parameter update. It introduces dual consent only for parameters that directly and materially affect pool revenue, pledge incentives, saturation, competitiveness or operational viability.

Amendments Still Require Onchain Approval

The remaining proposals focus on how constitutional information and decisions are structured.

CAP-9 would remove the requirement that governance metadata use immutable storage. Its proposed wording treats the hash included in an onchain governance action as the cryptographic commitment to the final document. A modified document would no longer match that hash, regardless of whether it was stored through conventional hosting or a content addressed system.

The proposal also separates integrity from availability. Immutable storage does not guarantee that a document will remain accessible, while a conventional hosting system can continue serving an unchanged document whose content matches the onchain hash.

CAP-2 seeks to remove Article II Section 7.4. Its author argues that the provision is too broad and allows inconsistent interpretation. The proposal remains under consultation and has not become approved constitutional language.

CIS-4 documents the problem of amendment bundling. It distinguishes changes that must travel together to keep the Constitution coherent from unrelated revisions placed into a single package. The statement does not prescribe a final rule but establishes the issue for further governance work.

CIS-11 addresses overlapping governance roles. The Constitution already requires public disclosure when one person participates across Cardano’s independent voting bodies, but it does not define a standard disclosure format, publication location or verification process.

The CAP framework operates as an offchain preparation layer where constitutional changes can be drafted, discussed and revised before entering Cardano’s onchain governance system. Proposals using the framework pass through community consultation and editor review, but the portal does not serve as a mandatory gate. Its official guide states that an author may still submit an onchain governance action directly.

At the time of publication, all seven items remain in consultation, with no proposals listed as Ready or Done. The Cardano Constitution therefore remains unchanged while the community reviews the language, separates procedural issues from proposed solutions and determines which texts are sufficiently developed for an onchain decision.