Vote on Intersect MBO 2026 Funding

I am voting YES on the governance action with hash b3d452bff7769d7f557ec6b8974760ee6c5e496c276652b654032966621e0ccf#4.

The metadata for my vote is located here, and this blog serves as a more human-readable form of that justification.

Justification

First, I have to report a slight conflict of interest; Sundae Labs built and administered the treasury portal used by intersect to distribute funds, and receives a small ongoing stipend to cover the infrastructure and maintenance costs of the portal; additionally, we are occasionally contracted to improve the portal or smart contracts.

However, this revenue does not represent a significant portion of our overall revenue; does not represent a significant portion of Intersects operating costs, and has never been perceived, by either party, as being dependent on our vote; indeed, to date most of these contracts have been signed before Intersect asked for funding.

There is, of course, some risk that subconciously, I am voting yes to ensure Intersect has funding for future contracts with Sundae Labs, but on reflection, I find that risk small. Nevertheless, if we secure future contracts from Intersect, I will ask that it be covered from a profit center supported by their administrative charge on treasury withdrawals they manage, rather than treasury funding.

I do not believe a conflict of interest is an immediate and unconditional reason to vote abstain. I believe conflicts of interest should be identified, analyzed, steps taken to expunge them, disclosed, and then, only if the conflict of interest continues to cloud the ability to judge a proposal on its merits alone, abstained.

In the past, I have erred extremely on the side of caution: Abstain on anything that has even a resemblence of conflict of interest from my part. However, given how involved I am in the ecosystem, this has made it increasingly difficult to simultaneously participate in governance, and robs those who delegate to me, and trust me to weigh and discharge my conflicts of interest in the interest of the Cardano ecosystem well, of a voice.

So, At the behest of several delegators, I have decided to relax this policy slightly; A conflict of interest will still always be clearly disclosed, but will no longer mean an automatic abstention of non-vote from me.

If this changes whether you wish to delegate to me, I will understand. I’m happy to provide endorsements to several good dReps on request.

With that said, I am voting YES on this proposal. I believe, and have seen in the wake of recent incidents, that Intersect is a net benefit to the ecosystem (barely) in proportion to the cost.

In the wake of the SecondFi incident, Intersect mobilized a diverse cast of experts to catalog the incident and provide appropriate outreach to some impacted parties.

Additionally, their triage and response to ongoing responsible disclosures of bugs and vulnerabilities in the Cardano node, along with orchestration of the recent Hard Fork, were reasonably effective.

Overall, I appreciate the trend towards cheaper and more effective governance under Jack Briggs direction. I would like to see this trend continue, however; Whether that be further cost cutting, improvement of the ADA price, or getting more mileage out of the same dollar, all such efforts are needed and would be welcome.

For example, while orchestrating the Van Rossum hard fork is an incredibly difficult, industry wide endeavor (and by no means do I think I could do better personally), I’m positive that future hardforks can apply lessons learned from this one and reduce inter-organizational friction and shorten timelines to adoption. Learning how to communicate impactful changes compared to interesting or exciting changes, for example, is the year-over-year compounding and institutional knowledge that Intersect should be building up to ensure that either costs continue to fall, or if costs stagnate, the Cardano community gets more out of them.

So, overall, I appreciate the efforts Intersect has taken to slim their budget. I know first hand how hard that kind of belt-tightening can be. And for the sake of Cardano, those gains need to compound year after year.