Tweag Prepares Smaller Cardano Treasury Proposal After DReps Push Back on 39.8M ADA Request

Tweag Narrows Cardano Treasury Request After Original Proposal Faces Heavy Opposition

Tweag by Modus Create is preparing a smaller Cardano Treasury withdrawal proposal after its original multi-year infrastructure request faced strong opposition from DReps.

The active proposal, titled “Tweag Core Cardano Infrastructure: Treasury Withdrawal 2026–2028,” was submitted on April 30, 2026, and requested ₳39,787,316, equal to roughly 9.95 million dollars at the time of documentation. The proposal covered 17 work packages across nine core infrastructure areas and was designed to support work through 2026–2028.

According to research compiled from governance dashboards and public DRep rationales, the original proposal had very low support before expiry, with Yes votes around 5.5 percent and No votes around 94.5 percent. Several DReps said they valued Tweag’s technical work, especially around Peras, but objected to the proposal’s size, duration and all-or-nothing structure.

During a Governance Hour session hosted by the Cardano Foundation, Christian Kowalski, blockchain ecosystem growth and partnership lead at Modus Create, said Tweag had listened to DRep feedback and decided to reduce the request. He said the revised version would run for 12 months and request slightly under 5 million dollars, estimated at approximately 18 to 19 million ADA using a 0.25 dollar peg.

The revised proposal had not yet been submitted on-chain as of the latest public updates cited in the research. Once submitted, it is expected to focus on three work packages: Ouroboros Peras V1 delivery and support, consensus conformance testing and history expiry.

Peras Remains the Core Cardano Infrastructure Item in the Revised Scope

Ouroboros Peras remains the most visible part of the revised scope. Peras is designed to improve Cardano transaction finality by giving users, applications and infrastructure providers faster assurance that a transaction has become final.

In the Governance Hour discussion, Kowalski compared the current experience to a check-based payment flow, where a transaction may be submitted but still needs time before settlement is fully confirmed. He said Peras is intended to reduce that waiting period and make Cardano more useful for payments, exchanges, Layer 2 systems, partner chains and enterprise settlement use cases.

The broader research points to Peras as an extension of Cardano’s Ouroboros consensus family, focused on faster post-facto settlement under favorable network conditions. Public explanations describe a target improvement from longer settlement windows toward roughly two to five minutes under good conditions, which is relevant for applications that depend on timely Layer 1 confirmation.

Tweag has already worked on earlier Peras stages through previous ecosystem funding. A prior 2025 Treasury withdrawal of ₳11,070,323 funded multiple core infrastructure items, including early Peras work, conformance testing, Canonical Ledger State and Genesis Sync Accelerator. The new proposal is expected to move Peras closer to production readiness, including mainnet-related work, deployment support and hard-fork coordination.

DReps Focus on Bundling, Treasury Pressure and SPO Sustainability

The main criticism of the original proposal was not centered on whether Peras or history expiry matter for Cardano. Public DRep rationales focused on the structure of the proposal, including the 17 bundled work packages, the multi-year duration, the large Treasury request and the lack of a shorter verification cycle.

Dave, dori, SIPO, YUTA and MrEdgarcross were among the DReps cited in the research as publicly raising concerns. Their comments broadly followed the same pattern: support for Tweag’s technical contributions and the importance of Peras, combined with objections to the size, scope or governance structure of the original proposal.

History expiry is another key item in the revised version. Kowalski said future throughput upgrades, including Leios, could increase storage requirements for node operators. History expiry is intended to reduce long-term storage pressure by allowing nodes to operate without keeping the same full historical footprint forever.

That issue connects directly to stake pool operators. Smaller SPOs may face higher costs if storage, electricity and hardware requirements rise as Cardano scales. By keeping history expiry in the shorter proposal, Tweag is keeping one of the infrastructure items most directly tied to node operation and long-term network participation.

The third work package, consensus conformance testing, is focused on making sure different Cardano node implementations follow the same rules. That becomes more important as Cardano moves toward greater node diversity through teams and efforts connected to IOG, Tweag, Amaru, Intersect and other infrastructure contributors.

The revised proposal now turns the issue into a narrower governance decision. DReps will not be voting on the same 17-package, multi-year structure that faced heavy opposition. They will be asked to judge a shorter request centered on Peras, testing and history expiry, three workstreams that the public debate has already identified as relevant to Cardano’s next phase of core infrastructure work.