Intersect Development Update #12 - May 3rd

13 min

Welcome all to the 12th installment of our development report! We are excited to discuss the key highlights we have been involved in this week: website roadmap, marketing working group, updates on our community funding, DRep Pioneer Program, governance tooling, April town hall, and more.

Here’s the update for you without any further ado.

Intersect’s website and members' area roadmap

This week, we published our feature roadmap for Intersect’s website and the upcoming members area. Highlights include dedicated pages relating to Cardano’s constitution and the Annual Members Meeting (to be held in October this year).

View the feature list and roadmap

Connecting with committees and working groups

Each Committee now has a chat thread on Discord. The committees will use this to announce any key messages, and Intersect Members can also use it to chat with the committee and ask questions. The Backlog/Vision and Budget committees will also have threads when they have been officially set up. You can also visit their gitbook pages for more information on the committees and their working groups.

The Open Source committee’s working groups

The Security working group is crafting a robust security policy for Intersect, tailored to Cardano, which involves aligning with best practices while addressing unique challenges. Measures include data encryption, access control, and regular audits to mitigate risks. Employee training fosters vigilance. This approach ensures operations integrity within Cardano's ecosystem.

The Project Lifecycle working group (page is currently work-in-progress) is diligently crafting a process to establish a clear lifecycle for projects within Intersect. This initiative aims to assess the maturity of projects within this framework, thereby distinguishing those performing well, those needing support to improve, and those slated for deprecation. These evaluations will be made publicly available.

The Project Incubation Working Group will launch next week, with the objective of outlining how projects can integrate into Intersect. This integration will facilitate the expansion of their contributor base and offer support services, including assistance from the Intersect team. Stay tuned for announcements regarding additional open-source office project support services in the upcoming weeks.

Marketing working group

Since the announcement of a marketing working group at Intersect, we’ve received over 80 applications from members and non-members alike! Over the following days, we will send out invites for the kick-off, where we will share proposed objectives, purpose, and roles—plus an opportunity for everyone to contribute their thoughts and feedback.


In addition, the marketing working group will steer a new upcoming grant category to explore market research and strategy, positioning marketing plans for inclusion in the annual budget for Cardano.

If you want to be a part of this new working group, you have a very small window to apply before invites are sent - please get your expression of interest submitted before Saturday, May 4th (12:00 UTC).

Community grants

We are pleased to announce the results of the Open Grant Category. After careful deliberation with a volunteer community evaluation group and ratification from the MCC, we are proud to announce the successful applicants (subject to contract) from this category are:

Ryan Wiley’s Cardano Governance MAV Dashboard: The Minimum Attack Vector (MAV) Dashboard is a tool designed for the Cardano blockchain that displays real-time governance action data through donut charts. It breaks down participation in governance actions by different groups within the Cardano community: Delegated Representatives (dReps), Stake Pool Operators (SPOs), the Constitutional Committee (CC), and an aggregated total of all groups. This allows users to quickly understand which entities hold influence over each of the proposal types based on stake-weighted delegation and voting thresholds. Additionally, it will highlight specific centralization risks for proposal types that can be passed by swaying the decisions for a small, specific group of voting parties. The dashboard aims to improve transparency and facilitate informed decision-making by providing a clear, visual representation of ADA distribution by delegation. It is designed to be user-friendly, ensuring that information is easily accessible for all stakeholders involved in the Cardano ecosystem. Congratulations Ryan Wiley!

MLabs’ CIP-95 support for Cardano Transaction Library: The Cardano transaction library is to be updated to support new Conway primitives and implement a CIP-95-enabled wallet connector. Successful implementation of this proposal would benefit Cardano transaction library users, who will unlock the ability to interact with CIP-1694 primitives via CIP-95 wallet interfaces.Congratulations, MLabs!

Local member meet-ups: Eleven members have also been contacted this week regarding their successful application to host an event in their local region for a small grant. We’ve almost covered the globe with events expected to take place across Asia, Australia, Africa, North America, and Europe. Peter Edwardsis leading the first today in his local City of Melbourne: Cardano Blockchain Melbourne. More on the other 10 events coming in next week’s update

The Inclusion & Accessibility (phase 1) Category and DevOps for Governance Tools are currently in evaluation. Results are due over the next couple of weeks.

The Education & Multimedia Grantees have also been publishing some fantastic content:

Lucas Macchiavelli has shared a number of resources, all available here:

Adam Rusch & Mike Hornan have published their 2nd Milestone - Cardano Governance in a Nutshell:

If you would like to find out more about awarded grants, please visit our Grant Project space on GitBook.

Governance tooling

The new features of GovTool are currently undergoing testing. This ensures all bugs are resolved, and usage is smooth and efficient once these are released on sanchogov.tools.

We will be opening in the next few weeks the grant for GovTool multi-language support. This is a significant step towards making our governance tool more accessible to all. The beta release roadmap has also been published, providing a clear timeline for the tool's development and testing. Your engagement and feedback are crucial in this process, and we encourage you to participate by continuing testing on sanchogov.tools and submitting feedback and ideas through the ‘feedback’ button.

Furthermore, the Byron Network team, with the WeDeliver team, is making progress in a new design system and component library based on material UI and a new modular architecture. Both will simplify the contribution to the development of Govtool.

Constitution technical form standard

This week, we took one step forward in a new governance-related community standard. The proposal, CIP-0120? | Constitution specification, describes a standardized technical form for the Cardano constitution. Aiming to enhance the document's accessibility and safety, this proposal offers an idea for how tools can read, render, and write the constitution.

We invite those interested in building governance tooling to take part in the technical review of this proposal.

SanchoNet

The first script-based DReps: This week Mike Hornan of ablepool, has been taking advantage of the new Conway functionality by deploying multi-sig script-based DReps. In a recent Youtube video, Mike alongside Ben of weed pool, Mike showcased a tutorial on how to create a multi-sig DRep.


Look out for them on SanchoNet via their DRep ID; drep_script1l94ks3gm3q9qzq3k6cxd07yd58cn2mcwc8taylwh2u6qjjccr98


Multisignature-based DReps allow for multiple individual key holders to come together under a single DRep ID. This mechanism facilitates multiple individuals to combine their expertises to attract delegation and to vote as one entity.

Here are the SanchoNet stats updated to include this week's values:


Wallets: In other news, we would like to highlight those community wallets who have upgraded their SanchoNet infrastructure to support Cardano node 8.10.0. This upgrade was particularly tricky for wallets, so we applaud Eternl and Nufi for being the first back online on SanchoNet. This means that to continue testing GovTool, for now Eternl and Nufi are the only supported wallets. For more information, please check the GovTool Docs on wallet compatibility.

April’s Intersect town hall

On the 30th of April, we held our monthly town hall meeting. This platform brings together many community members like you to meet up, network, and discuss the future of Cardano’s ecosystem. These meetings are about updates and providing a space for open dialogue and feedback.


A few weeks ago, we launched a grant category for an Intersect member to take over our Town Halls. This category has now closed, and we will announce the successful applicant in mid-May.

We hope to see as many people as possible at May’s Town Hall, which will be held on May 28th. It's going to be an exciting opportunity to connect, network, and discuss the future of Cardano.

Consensus

Intersect will be present at Consensus 2024! Co-sponsored by Intersect members, Genius Yield, Genius X, EMURGO, and Hosky, this year’s event will centre around laying the foundations of a more decentralized future. Consensus will be held in Austin, Texas, this year and is currently the world's largest, longest-running, and most influential gathering, bringing together all sides of the cryptocurrency, blockchain, and Web3 community.

If you wish to attend, you can get your tickets here and get 15% off your pass using our code - INTERSECTC24.

This week's reminders

In this week's reminders section, we’d like to highlight:


We have officially started evaluating the Inclusion & Accessibility Phase 1 through the Community Evaluation working group. The evaluation will take approximately two weeks to complete and will follow with ratification from the MCC with expected results on Friday, 17th May. We look forward to providing you with an update on the following stages of this project based on this group's insights.

Well, that’s it for this week's update. Thanks for reading!

And finally, we’re interested in hearing more from you about subjects important to you, such as Cardano’s governance. Your ideas and suggestions are crucial to us. If you have any questions, ideas, or suggestions, please get in touch via email, X, or LinkedIn.