Beyond MVG Project: Complete

The Beyond Minimum Viable Governance (Beyond MVG) project is now complete. The project closes out having delivered everything it set out to: a governance health measurement framework, comprehensive data collection, a final State of Governance report, a set of prioritized recommendations, concrete first steps taken for each, and a playbook for future projects to build on. This post summarizes what the project found, what it recommends, and what happens next.  These projects’ deliverables are also held in the project linktree and Beyond MVG GitHub repo for easy reference and adaptation.

The Final Milestone

The fourth milestone focused on translating the data gathered across Milestones 1–3 into actionable recommendations for improving Cardano's governance.

• Facilitated Community Workshops: Ten workshops were held across multiple time zones to discuss ideas to resolve the top governance challenges identified earlier in the project. Workshop recordings can be found in the project’s workshop portal.

• Concrete next steps for each recommendation: The project team took the first step to move each recommendation forward. This included nudging two technical governance CIPs into the ledger development pipeline, drafting a CPS, drafting feature suggestions, and holding discussions with wallet providers and progressing a governance incident readiness effort within Intersect.

• Final State of Governance Report: Published in English, Indonesian, and Japanese. The report explains the governance measurement framework, presents findings from the data, and summarizes the top recommendations for Cardano’s governance.

• Governance Process Playbook: The playbook documents the project methodology as a guide for anybody who wants to replicate it in the future.

Governance Challenges

Data collected across survey responses, interviews, on-chain data analysis, and fifteen workshops painted an overarching picture - Cardano's governance is functional, but still lacks several elements to maintain healthy and sustainable participation.

Voting power is slowly concentrating. DRep voting power shows early signs of consolidating among a smaller number of actors. Voting delegation is static rather than responsive to governance actions. Re-delegation to smaller DReps has not been observed to counteract this trend. However, since more stake remains dormant than actively engaged in voting, there’s still potential for significant changes in voting power distribution.

Participation is not easy. Governance proposals are complex to analyze, and information is hard to aggregate when evaluating actions. The lack of simple translations creates an additional friction for non-English speakers on top of the already time-consuming voting process. Tooling remains very minimal for SPOs and CC members. Similar to the lack of translations, this additional participation barrier is causing a decline in participation of these two governing bodies.

Governance participation requires unnecessarily high overhead for SPOs. SPOs see operations as their priority, and struggle to quickly determine when a governance action is live that requires their vote. For an SPO to participate in governance, they have to constantly monitor for governance actions and then sift through documents like CIP-1694 or the Cardano Constitution to determine if it requires their vote. This is an additional burden that takes time away from operations.

Sustainable participation is at risk. The lack of compensation for DReps and Constitutional Committee members threatens long-term participation from good actors who otherwise have no direct benefit (such as treasury funding) for governance participation.

Top Recommendations

Five priorities rose to the top based on community input and cost/benefit assessments.

1. Coordinated Community Discussion on DRep Concentration: Cardano needs a focused, community-led process to agree on solutions that resist the trend toward DRep voting power concentration. This includes examining incentive design and the feasibility of delegation caps. Active discussions are already underway via Intersect working groups, and a CPS on DRep delegation caps has been submitted.

2. Social Governance Incident Readiness: The ecosystem lacks a clear protocol for responding to social governance incidents — coordinated manipulation, disinformation, or emergent crises that could undermine legitimate governance processes. The work to define social governance scenarios of concern and how to respond to each is now underway in coordination with Intersect.

3. Wallet One-Click Delegation and Removing the Rewards Barrier: Also aimed at addressing DRep power concentration, governance features in wallets can be designed to help new users discover governance (bring more stake into governance) and delegate to a diverse set of DReps (avoid UX defaults that direct new delegation to the same DReps). At the same time, remove the requirement to delegate to a DRep to withdraw rewards. This governance feature successfully bootstrapped a legitimate amount of delegation into governance, but now causes extra work for wallets, user friction, and leads users to rely on wallet defaults when picking how to delegate, which likely contributes to delegation concentration rather than distribution. Four wallet providers have been engaged, and work is underway on governance feature updates in at least one wallet.

4. SPO Voting Tools Without Cold Keys: SPOs strongly prefer governance tooling that does not require them to use their cold keys. Enabling the ledger to read Calidus key signatures  — a proposed solution — has been raised as a feature to evaluate for adding to the next hard fork.

5. CC Compensation and Tooling: The Constitutional Committee requires both sustainable compensation mechanisms and better tooling to function effectively over time. Research into reimbursement pathways is complete, and a reimbursement proposal being drafted so that security-critical CC setup (hardware and legal entity formation) can be reimbursed while more complicated compensation discussions can proceed alongside DRep compensation discussions.  The proposal also includes an optional grant to develop tooling to reduce the technical barriers for CC participation.

Honorable mentions with a low cost/high impact ratio; these ideas were progressed as well. They included:

• Clearer communications and notifications for when SPO votes are required, and

• Establishing a dedicated platform for governance action debate outside of social media.

The 2026 State of Governance Report

The final State of Governance report is now published. It contains the full analysis behind the findings summarized here — the on-chain data, community sentiment, metric benchmarks, and the reasoning behind each recommendation.

For tooling providers and researchers, the report links to the detailed metrics manual covering how to measure the twelve governance health metrics the project defined. This is intended to lower the barrier for anyone who wants to build monitoring dashboards or extend this work.

The Governance Process Playbook

The Governance Process Playbook documents the methodology used throughout the project — from research to community data collection, analysis, workshop facilitation, and recommendation development — in a format that any future project can replicate and improve.

The goal is simple: the next team that wants to run a community consultation process on Cardano governance should not have to start from scratch.

What Comes Next

The project concludes, but the work does not.

Every top recommendation already has momentum behind it. Community members, individuals on the project team, working groups, and ecosystem contributors are actively carrying each one forward. Beyond MVG's role was to surface the right problems, build data-driven recommendations, and take the first concrete steps. From here, the community takes ownership.

If you want to get involved — whether in governance tooling, DRep incentive design, SPO participation, CC sustainability, or any of the other areas this project touched — the entry points are open. The related CPSs, CIPs, and feature definitions are linked in the action item summary document.

Cardano's governance is moving beyond “minimum viable” thanks to the work done throughout this project, and more importantly, through the incredibly hard work of various community members.  One thing that stood out as the project recommendations were developed was that almost all of them had organic community momentum behind them - people close to governance can feel these problems and try to solve them.  Several efforts benefited from the concrete data gathered in this project to convince the right stakeholders to progress beyond ideas to execution.