Who Are the Four Candidates Backed by Cardano Foundation for the 2026 Constitutional Committee?

Cardano Foundation announced on July 23, 2026, that it had submitted its ballot in Cardano’s Constitutional Committee election and publicly identified the four candidates it supported. The Foundation did not publish a scoring framework or detailed explanation for its selections.

Who Are the Four Candidates Backed by Cardano Foundation?

Cardano Foundation allocated its support to two individual candidates and two consortiums:

>Gbiri Oluwaseun, known as Olokoji

• >Marek Mahut

• >Cardano Curia

• >Asia Africa Cardano Coalition, or AACC

Gbiri Oluwaseun, known as Olokoji, is a governance practitioner with three years of experience in decentralized autonomous organizations, including work involving the interpretation of constitutional documents. Within Cardano, he contributes to the Governance Incentive Working Group and the Constitution Amendment Workgroup.

His candidacy focuses on applying the Cardano Constitution carefully and consistently, supported by published reasoning that allows the community to follow how individual decisions were reached.

Marek Mahut is a long-standing technical contributor to the Cardano ecosystem and the founder of Blockfrost, an infrastructure and API platform used by developers to access blockchain data and build Cardano applications.

Mahut’s background includes open-source development, infrastructure tooling, and work on Cardano dating back to the Shelley Incentivized Testnet. His candidacy emphasizes deliberative governance, with a focus on the process through which constitutional decisions gain legitimacy.

Cardano Curia is a five-member consortium that currently serves on the Constitutional Committee. It was elected during the December 2025 snap election, which was held to restore the committee’s quorum.

The consortium has served through an active period of Cardano governance and has published public rationales for its committee votes. It is seeking re-election based on its existing record, continuity of institutional knowledge, and experience reviewing governance actions.

Asia Africa Cardano Coalition is a volunteer-led consortium of community leaders, developers, educators, and governance participants from Asia and Africa.

AACC focuses on regional representation, multilingual access, financial inclusion, and the socioeconomic barriers that can limit participation in decentralized governance. Several of its members participated in the Cardano Constitutional Convention, while the coalition’s broader work includes education, town halls, and support for community participation across both regions.

Intersect’s official candidate overview confirms that ten candidates are standing for four available seats.

How the 2026 Constitutional Committee Election Works

The Constitutional Committee reviews governance actions to determine whether they comply with the Cardano Constitution. It does not decide whether a proposal is commercially attractive or politically desirable. Its role is limited to constitutional oversight within Cardano’s governance framework.

DReps vote through Intersect’s Ekklesia platform using delegated voting power. Each DRep may support up to four candidates, and every selected candidate receives the DRep’s full stake-weighted voting power. Ballot selections can be changed until voting closes on July 23 at 21:45 UTC.

The Foundation’s published selections form part of the broader stake-weighted DRep vote and do not constitute a direct appointment. Its choices combine DAO governance experience, technical infrastructure knowledge, current committee service, and representation from communities across Asia and Africa.

What Happens After DRep Voting Closes?

The off-chain election result does not immediately appoint the four successful candidates to the Constitutional Committee.

After voting closes, the results are scheduled to undergo an independent audit before the final candidate ranking is published. The elected candidates and their constitutional credentials will then be consolidated into an on-chain Update Committee governance action.

The action must then complete Cardano’s on-chain ratification and enactment process. Only after that process is completed will the successful candidates formally assume their seats.

Cardano Foundation’s published ballot identifies its preferred four candidates, but the election’s legal effect will come from the audited result and the subsequent on-chain governance decision rather than from the Foundation’s endorsement alone.