The results of the Cardano 2026 budget vote have been released. Intersect, the member organization responsible for promoting Cardano's open-source development, released an audit report disclosing participation in this round of Hydra Voting, the count of valid votes, and the final support rates for each proposal.
This round of voting used Snapshot Epoch 636 as the eligibility benchmark. A total of 113 voters participated, with 112 votes valid and 1 invalid. Based on voting rights, DRep's total voting rights were approximately 6.009 billion ADA, of which approximately 5.071 billion ADA were valid voting rights, resulting in a final participation rate of 84.39%.
Many proposals exceeded the 67% threshold.
According to the rules, proposals with a support rate exceeding 67% were approved. The approved projects mainly focused on infrastructure maintenance, technical tools, and governance coordination, demonstrating that community funds still prioritize underlying development and network operations.
TxPipe received the most support in this round of proposals. Its Pallas project garnered 85.67% support, the highest among all individual proposals. This project is primarily responsible for the second year of maintenance of the Cardano core Rust library. The Dolos project followed closely with 85.28%, responsible for maintaining lightweight data nodes.
In addition, TxPipe's UTxO RPC received 85.08% support, Ora received 73.57%, and Tx3 received 75.63%. The results show that TxPipe held a significant advantage in this round of budget voting, reflecting DRep's recognition of its technical execution capabilities.
Intersect and Mithril also received considerable support.
Besides TxPipe, Mithril Protocol received 81.33% support. This project primarily serves lightweight client infrastructure. Intersect's proposal on "Governance Coordination and Technical Management" also passed with 80.91% support.
The Wirex proposal, related to payment scenarios, received 78.93% support, making it one of the stronger non-infrastructure projects in this round. The MLabs core tool maintenance and enhancement proposal received 72.62%, the hardware wallet maintenance proposal received 71.33%, and the Intersect technical steering committee support proposal passed with 68.45%.
It is worth noting that none of the approved proposals barely passed the threshold. Even the proposal with the lowest approval rate was more than one percentage point above the threshold, indicating that the differences in this round of voting were relatively limited.
The audit was conducted by Intersect itself.
Intersect stated that the audit covered voting eligibility verification, valid vote determination, participation rate calculated by voting rights, and the final proposal results. The report provides a relatively complete record of data for this round of budgeting.
However, the article also mentions that the vote was organized and audited by Intersect, and the report did not mention an independent third-party auditing firm. This means that external scrutiny of the process is primarily based on the methods and data disclosed by Intersect itself.
As Cardano advances on-chain governance under the Voltaire governance framework, the way budget voting is conducted, the transparency of audits, and the verification mechanisms may continue to influence governance expectations in subsequent rounds.
