Cardano Foundation's Project Catalyst F14 Participation

A new strategy takes on the community’s recommendations

Building on our experience in Project Catalyst F12 and F13, the Cardano Foundation’s role in F14 will shift from simple participation to empowering community expertise. We will limit our voting power to a single wallet of approximately 20 million ada and focus our voting power exclusively on one single track to support community-led innovation.

The Cardano Foundation will only vote on the track Cardano Use Cases: Partners & Products, which has a total fund budget of ₳8.5M.

This focused approach allows us to contribute our enterprise experience where it is most valuable, while leaving substantial funding decisions in other categories fully to the community.

Proposals in the selected track will undergo the following structured review process by the Foundation:

Business feasibility evaluation
Technical and critical review
Final overall review and evaluation by the Executive Committee

We will share more details about this process and its outcomes in a subsequent blog post, to be published before the voting period ends.

Catalyst Representative Pilot

We are introducing a pilot for the upcoming Representative role on Catalyst. In this pilot, Foundation subject-matter experts will review proposals within their fields of expertise and provide recommendations to the community to assist with informed voting. The pilot will serve as a platform to utilize expertise both from community members within the Foundation and importantly, from community experts across the wider ecosystem via discussion in roundtable talks.

The Foundation will not actually vote on recommendations made by these subject matter experts in F14.

We anticipate that the Representative role will be officially introduced in upcoming Catalyst funds and expanded to subject-matter experts in the wider community, and we welcome the enhanced diversity of the subject-matter expertise which it will bring.

During this pilot, across the Foundation, experts who are active community members within the Cardano ecosystem will review proposals under the following categories and make their recommendations on promising proposals:

Cardano Open: Developers for proposals featuring innovative tools or specialized building blocks that don’t already exist, solve real problems for many developers, and deliver reusable value beyond niche use cases.

Cardano Open: Ecosystem & Cardano Use Cases: Concepts for proposals related to:

Developer Growth: proposals that foster education, tooling, and community support to onboard, upskill, and retain developers for long-term success.
Governance: proposals delivering MVP-level governance tooling/UX for governance bodies (DReps, SPOs, CC) or running short-term research/community programs with clear, verifiable governance KPIs.
Sustainability: proposals for legacy and blockchain-native use cases, research, education, and events that positively impact Cardano adoption, aligned with sustainability frameworks such as the UN SDGs.

We will share the final list of recommendations publicly, but will not vote in these categories.

Roundtable Talks

To strengthen Catalyst’s decision-making and transparency, we encourage community members with subject-matter expertise (e.g., DeFi, Enterprise, Interoperability, etc.) to share their insights with voters. This will enable the community to make better-informed decisions given the high volume of proposals.

As part of this pilot, we will select participants who reflect a broad set of expertise themes to take part in one of two Community Roundtable Talks taking place during the voting period for Fund 14 (22 September – 6 October 2025).

Apply to participate in a Community Roundtable Talk here

To participate, please upload a post on the Cardano Forum’s Project Catalyst sub-category here and tag it with the tag “catalyst-rep-pilot” by 22 September 2025, which includes:

Your chosen expertise as a Representative
A clear definition of your expertise theme
Evidence of your expertise
Selection of proposals reviewed
Your review methodology

With these steps, the Cardano Foundation is evolving its role in Project Catalyst — contributing as one of many players in the ecosystem, and working to complement and empower the community’s expertise, diversity, and innovation.

Alexandre Maaza
Sustainability and Innovation Lead