Welcome to this week's Intersect dev update! We'll cover the Cardano budget and how to get involved, updates on Chang #2, the latest governance report and actions, community hubs' activities, governance tools, DReps, delivery assurance, and details about November's Intersect Town Hall. Let's dive in!

For the first time, the Cardano ecosystem will come together to decide which initiatives the treasury should fund for 2025 and beyond. This includes core infrastructure enhancements, research and development, community grants, marketing efforts, and more. Discussions on how to allocate Cardano's treasury and manage its finances are expected to generate lively debate.

Intersect is facilitating the creation of Cardano’s 2025 budget proposal, which members will develop from seven core committees. The Budget Committee, as a key part of this process, will coordinate and compile the input from these committees to create a proposed budget for on-chain community review. This proposal will guide treasury funding for infrastructure projects, R&D, grants, and more.

Your input is crucial during this consultation phase in November and December. We're eager to hear your ideas, suggestions, and feedback on fund allocation, treasury management strategies, the frequency of on-chain approvals, and other key aspects. Your participation is what makes our community strong.

Take an active part in the process
Intersect encourages participation in the consultation phase through surveys, AMA sessions, and committee engagements.  Contributions from all stakeholders enhance the planning process.

Intersect will continue publishing updates, resources, and engagement opportunities to ensure transparency and community involvement in budget development. - Read more here

DReps - Delegated representatives
We’re excited to update you on the DRep Working Group's ongoing efforts to demystify the Cardano budget process! Each week, we hold dedicated meetings where Lloyd Dunhold, Subject Matter Expert in the Budget committee, breaks down complex parts of the process and clarifies any challenging details. This is a valuable opportunity for DReps to gain deeper insight and ask questions collaboratively.

If you’re interested in joining us and enhancing your understanding, we encourage you to attend our next session; here is the link

Chang #2 report
The governance action to hard fork the preview environment has now been ratified on-chain. Following one epoch, the preview environment will hard fork to protocol version 10.0, unlocking full governance on Preview. This occurred at the epoch boundary, a specific point in time determined by the blockchain, at 00:00 UTC on November 6. You can see the action via CardanoScan.

What this means
Ecosystem readiness for the Chang #2 hard fork is in full swing. As a stake pool operator (SPO), DApp developer, or other user, the time to test and start upgrading is now. Hard fork-capable releases are available to test in Sanchonet and will soon be available in Preview. Pre-production is also expected to follow soon. 

Governance actions
For Chang #2, a number of governance actions are in progress across networks as prerequisites, including hard forks in both pre-production and production mainnet environments. We understand that governance actions can be new and tricky, which is why we've published a new FAQ answering common questions you may have and some lessons to be learned, available now on the Chang upgrade #2 knowledge base.

Keep informed
Join the dedicated Chang #2 Discord channel at #hfwg-chang-2

The Intersect knowledge base has been updated, and information about Chang #2 can be found in our refreshed Cardaro Updates space. We recommend you bookmark this space and keep checking back. Details have been added, as confirmed by the hard fork working group.

Governance report
Node 10.1.2 release and testing
The release of Node 10.1.2 has brought changes to CLI commands based on community feedback, particularly from SPOs. Functionally, this version mirrors Node 10.1.1, so users should refer to the release notes from 10.1.1 when utilizing either version.
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Governance actions and hard fork preparation
Progress is being made on key governance actions for the Chang #2 hard fork, which include:

• Plutus cost model update - The parameters and technical steering committees recommend adjustments to prepare the network.
• Hard fork metadata - A comprehensive description of the upgrade’s goals and impacts, shared for review and soon to be finalized. The development can be monitored through the IntersectMBO governance actions page.

The hard fork working group is discussing and aiming to raise these actions for voting within the current epoch to ensure sufficient time for the constitution committee and SPO voting before the festive break. Additionally, Intersect will launch an ecosystem status page to display the readiness for the Chang #2 upgrade.

Stake pool and DRep engagement
Efforts are underway to boost DReps participation and strengthen Cardano’s community representation. This includes blog updates, social media posts, and interactive X Spaces for better engagement.

Upcoming events and resources
Once the mainnet hard fork action is submitted, a community Q&A session will be held. The Cardano upgrades knowledge base will continue to provide resources, summaries, and session recordings for community awareness.

Governance actions

• Protocol parameter update—Plutus V3 cost model: The initial goal was to update Plutus V3 with new costing variables for the Chang #2 hard fork. However, the action was invalidated due to omitted variables to prevent voting. You can read the full report on this here - Oops! What's up with governance action 51f4…74#0?.
• Info action—should K increase? This proposal encourages discussion around the K parameter, which impacts stake pool saturation and rewards. It is an open discussion, and we are not currently suggesting changes.
  • Submitted: October 11, 2024 (epoch 514)
  • Expires: November 10, 2024 (end of epoch 520)
• Info action – Plutus V3 cost model parameter changes: A proposal for a parameter update to enable new Plutus primitives in protocol version 10, set for after the Chang #2 hard fork.
  • Submitted: November 5, 2024 (epoch 519)
  • Expires: December 5, 2024 (end of epoch 526)

Intersect publishes a report on all things Cardano governance-related once a week on X. This week's full report is here.

Open source
The open source office is proud to announce Intersect’s Security Council. Facilitated by Intersect, the security council is a dedicated group responsible for ensuring the Cardano blockchain ecosystem's security, integrity, and reliability. Composed of key stakeholders, the council focuses on developing and enforcing security policies, managing incident responses, and mitigating risks within the ecosystem.

The council's mission is to establish and maintain a robust security posture for the Cardano blockchain ecosystem by effectively managing security risks, responding to incidents, and fostering a security-aware community. Its guiding principles are confidentiality and integrity. 

The security council operates and reports to the Technical Steering Committee but acts autonomously for the betterment of Cardano. It is accountable for overseeing the security processes, managing incident responses, and ensuring compliance with security policies. This council was established to respond to the recently updated Security.md that is being updated on each repository under Intersect. For more information, you can visit the Security Council GitBook, and you can reach out to them directly by emailing them at security@intersectmbo.org

Membership and community
We are pleased to see a gradual increase in associates and individual members week on week. Japan holds the top spot with the highest number of individual members, at 492, which is nearly 30% of the total Individual member base.

Our focus now is growing the enterprise membership. Following a positive experience at the recent Cardano Summit in Dubai, our membership team are now following up with several attendees that have expressed interest in joining Intersect as enterprise members. If you are interested in learning more about the enterprise membership please feel free to reach out to us for more information. 

Automated community hub introductory emails
We have been working on developing automated community hub introductory emails to be sent to new associates, individual members, and enterprise members. When someone signs up to become a member of Intersect and selects a country where we have an active community hub, they will automatically receive an email with information about that hub.

This will include the Hub Manager’s details, social media handles, and contact details. We have also worked with our amazing Hub Managers to translate the introductory email where required. We encourage new members to connect with their local community hub and get involved!

This week’s membership stats are below: 

Community hubs
Last week, our Africa hub (led by WADA) held a WADA Town Hall on October 31. You can watch the recording here (passcode: Af*1ZrBd).

Our Community Hubs have been busy hosting lots of Town Hall events this week:

Japan hub

• X space will be held on November 8 at 9 pm local time or, for those not in Japan, noon UTC. To join, click here.

LATAM hub

• Spanish Town Hall was held on November 5 with 84 attendees. You can listen to the recording here.
• Portuguese Town Hall was held on November 6 with 124 attendees. You can listen to the recording here.

Africa hub (led by WADA)

• The WADA Town Hall was held on November 7, and 22 attendees attended. The recording can be watched here (passcode: qqfR1=L&).

Europe hub (led by Clay Nation)

• The Town Hall was held on November 6, and 155 people tuned in. You can listen to the recording here.

North America hub (led by AWEN)

• Town Hall was held on November 6 with 33 tuning in. You can listen to the recording here.

And here you can see the updated Community hub stats: 

Community tooling
This week, we are delighted to announce the completion of Lucas Macchievelli’s educational grant (Milestone 4). Lucas has produced a thread and an infographic detailing “What is Intersect, its structure and how to join.” These are available on X in Spanish and English.

Equally, Harmonic Labs (Cohort 1) has uploaded their close-out video showcasing the upgrade plu-ts to support PlutusV3 and Governance.

For more information about Community Grants, please visit our Grant project space.

Governance tooling
We expect the new version of GovTool to be released in the week of November 4 to 8. The most notable update is the support for CIP-129. All updates are detailed in the release notes and will soon be available on page 1.0.26. You can also track the community backlog here.

The recent governance action outcome grant winner, LidoNation, is being onboarded and will soon bring positive impact and first results.

Cardano GovTool is in its bootstrapping phase, with a second hard fork planned in the coming weeks to enable full governance. All teams are working to ensure this transition supports full governance while maintaining system stability. Updates can be followed on SanchoNet, Preview, and the core-gov-tool-announcement Discord channel.

You can also check for compatible wallets and known issues.

CC-Portal
A new CC-Portal release, including new user experience improvements, is coming out on November 8. Next week, yet another release aims to be fully CIP-136 compliant.

CC-Portal aims to offer easy access to the interim Cardano constitution and provide constitutional committee members with a streamlined interface for creating metadata as part of their on-chain voting rationale. Additionally, it serves as a platform for the Cardano community to understand committee members' voting actions better.

These improvements will make it easier for the constitutional committee and the wider Cardano community to engage with governance actions. The updates are expected to elevate both usability and transparency for all users.

Governance tools working group
The governance tools working group held another meeting this week, focusing on community backlog assessment and how we can incentivize its work and make it more transparent and compelling to the community and the whole ecosystem. You can track the community backlog here.

The working group continues to invite community members to participate in discussions and feature development for the Cardano GovTool. All feedback is welcome (see guide on feedback), and ongoing conversations are held in the wg-governance-tools Discord channel, where new feature ideas are regularly triaged and implemented.

Governance in numbers
As we press ahead following Chang #1, follow the progress of governance actions on-chain here every week. Since Friday, November 1, 2024: 

• We've advanced from epoch 519 to epoch 520
• Unique delegators increased by 2,799 (16,902 -> 19,701)
• Total number of vote delegations increased by 3,017 (18,366 -> 21,383)
• Total DRep votes increased by 23 (396 -> 419)
• Total number of DRep registrations increased by 30 (624 -> 654)
• DReps who have attached metadata increased by 27 (393 -> 420)

To learn how to start using Cardano GovTool, explore GovTool documentation. Here, you'll find everything from step-by-step guides to detailed explanations of its features.

On the Intersect Discord server, you can connect to the core maintainers of governance tools via the new request and new help & support channels under Core Governance Tools in Discord. 

Delivery assurance
The delivery assurance team at Intersect ensures that projects undertaking Cardano core protocol development and maintenance work stay on track and meet high standards, ensuring we deliver on time and with quality. Here is the latest report covering the work completed during October - Milestone completion reports | Intersect - Knowledge Base.

At our recent Town Hall, we welcomed James Parker from Galois, who shared insights into Galois’s recent work on Recursive Zero-Knowledge Proofs.

Here are the latest stats from the Delivery assurance team:

November Intersect Town Hall update
The upcoming November Intersect Town Hall, organized by Swarm, is set for Thursday, November 28, at 16:00 UTC. The meeting will be held on Zoom, and participants can join via this link.

Call for updates
Intersect invites Grant Projects, Working Groups, and Special Interest Groups to share updates on their current work during this Town Hall. To participate:

1. Make a copy of this slide template.
2. Add your information to the slide.
3. Send your completed slide by emailing the link to coreswarm@gmail.com or posting it on Discord in the Intersect Town Halls channel.

We’re excited to showcase your news, contributions, and participation, which help shape the future of community engagement and governance within Intersect.

Important member resources

• Intersect knowledge base - frequently updated, our knowledge base provides granular detail on our internal governance structure, committees and working groups, and funding opportunities, among many other items.
• Intersect website - the latest news, roadmap, and more.
• Support - Please always use your membership email address and contact Intersect for support with any application errors, login issues, or questions without answers.
• GovTool - take part in testing governance actions on the SanchoNet testnet.
• Discord / Telegram - join our lively community and interact with committees, working groups, and other members.
• Intersect events calendar - keep up-to-date with all events Intersect hosts, such as working group and committee meetings, X spaces, and more.
• Social - we are continually active on Twitter (X) and LinkedIn, so follow us there to stay updated on our latest news and 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.