Show Your Work: MLabs' History of Cardano Funding
It’s 2026, and with new funding rounds approaching, accountability is front-and-center in the Cardano ecosystem. That’s fair. MLabs agrees that builders and community members should take a hard look at how funding has been spent and how it will be spent moving forward.
We’re also aligning our 2026 activities with the Cardano 2030 Strategic Framework. The fact that the community coordinated around a long-term direction and formally supported it through on-chain governance is a meaningful milestone for Cardano, and we think it’s a good anchor for evaluating what to fund next.
But that’s jumping ahead. In the spirit of Alex Maaza’s “send in the auditors” tweet, before we plan the next cycle, we should take stock of where we are today. This post summarizes MLabs’ treasury-funded work across the ecosystem (Project Catalyst, direct Intersect grant work, and Intersect-administered treasury/vendor funding). With the aim of transparency, it covers what we were funded to do, what we delivered, what’s still in flight, and what we’re actively closing out.
Project CatalystTo date, Project Catalyst represents the greatest source of our community funding. We began participating in Fund7 as Plutus was being introduced. We have delivered several project types over the years - dApps, compilers, developer tooling, R&D - and contributed a number of open-source outputs that have been integrated into production systems or adopted by other teams. Examples include:
DAO Traded Funds: an “ETF-like” basket/vault structure for on-chain asset management. Our implementation was merged into a collaborative project and deployed to mainnet.
Double DAO: An open-source modular governance framework for spinning up configurable DAOs quickly. This work was also integrated into a collaborative project and deployed to mainnet.
Plutarch: a typed Haskell eDSL for significantly more efficient UPLC validators than offered by Plutus. In the Alonzo era, Plutarch was vital to overcoming severe Plutus limitations and helped forge the earliest dApps on Cardano. It became widely used in the Alonzo era and remains part of the Cardano smart contract tooling stack.
Cardano Transaction Library: A powerful and much-needed transaction-building library created as a practical alternative to the Alonzo-era Plutus Application Backend approach. CTL was one of the earliest transaction-building middleware libraries, and it is used in production by several teams.
cardano.nix: an open-source Nix flake & NixOS module suite allowing declarative deployment of Cardano infrastructure and monitoring. It has been adopted by several Nix-focused teams.
FeesaSwap - formerly PisaFees: a mainnet fee-abstraction layer across Cardano that allows users to transact without preloading ADA by sourcing fees/collateral from token liquidity, now being hardened for wallet/dApp integrations (oracles + production backend).
YTxP: reference implementation of a Cardano-specific proxy pattern that supports efficient smart contract upgrades. It has been incorporated into at least one major live dApp.
Conway Maintenance: a maintenance proposal that brought our core tooling in line with the Conway era and Cardano's governance upgrade.
These are just a handful of examples of how MLabs leverages well-scoped and professionally engineered solutions and delivers concrete, reusable tooling and infrastructure.
At the time of writing, we have two active Catalyst proposals (out of 44 funded proposals throughout our history with the fund): Agora dRep Effect Validator (ID: 1300140) and Static Analysis with Covenant (1300143).
Currently, 1300140 is in final administrative review. Looking at the milestone module, the final milestone has 2/2 reviewer approvals in the Catalyst milestone module, and we are awaiting the final Proof of Achievement sign-off.
On the other hand, 1300143 is similarly winding down. We're happy to report that Covenant is effectively feature-complete and in stabilization. The team reports the bulk of c2uplc is done, with only test/merge finalization, conformance-case verification, release prep, and the actual milestone submission remaining.
Intersect-funded Work and Treasury WithdrawalsBeyond Catalyst, MLabs has delivered work funded via both Intersect-run community grants and Cardano Treasury withdrawal proposals administered through Intersect.
MLabs delivered two Intersect-funded projects:
Plutarch Conway-era Upgrade: Updated Plutarch for the Conway ledger era, including governance-related changes and Plutus V3 updates.
CTL Conway Support & CIP-95 Wallet Connector: Updated CTL for Conway and delivered supporting PureScript components, including a Conway-compatible serialization layer, a CIP-95 PureScript package, and dependency upgrades.
Both grants were delivered and closed out on schedule, providing Conway-era updates to widely used tooling.
In 2025, MLabs also had three Cardano Treasury proposals funded: two core-tool maintenance proposals (Plutarch and cardano.nix) and one research proposal (GrumpleStiltSkin). Plutarch maintenance helps keep a widely used smart contract eDSL compatible with ledger-era changes and real-world developer needs. Similarly, cardano.nix maintenance ensures a reproducible, version-pinned deployment path for Cardano infrastructure, reducing operator toil and misconfiguration risk.
GrumpleStiltSkin expands what Cardano smart contracts can do on-chain by providing a reusable framework for verifying cryptographic proofs over parameterized elliptic curves and finite fields. Instead of each team re-implementing complex curve logic, it offers a shared Plutarch foundation that can be configured for different curves and use cases. The result is less duplicated effort, safer reuse, and more composable building blocks for ZK-based applications on Cardano.
For all three proposals, we delivered the first two milestones without issue. For milestone 3, the implementation work is complete, but we have not been able to obtain third-party assurance sign-off due to delays on the auditor side stemming from the year-end period.
As a result, milestone approval has been paused on the assurance step rather than on implementation. We’ve been coordinating with the auditors and Intersect to unblock delivery here and currently expect to be reviewed in the coming weeks. We expect to immediately finalize these milestones once the assurance review is complete.
Cardano Builder DAOFinally, MLabs recently joined the Cardano Builders DAO (CBD) as a voting member. The CBD is an ecosystem funding initiative led by Clear Contracts and funded by the treasury. We intend to participate actively as a voting member in this iteration. In the future, depending on community funding priorities, we may seek funding to further support FeesaSwap as it gains initial traction with users.
ClosingTreasury funding is under sharper scrutiny, and accountability is becoming a prerequisite rather than an afterthought. We agree with that, but accountability shouldn’t degrade into a community pile-on whenever sentiment turns anxious. It should be a lightweight, repeatable system that helps teams deliver outcomes on a timeline that is visible, and in a way that maps to shared priorities and KPIs, like those outlined in Cardano 2030 Strategic Framework.
Broadly, MLabs supports a MEAL-style approach, if it suits the ecosystem, so funded work can be tracked against clear targets and, where possible, tied to ecosystem KPIs. The ecosystem benefits when “show your work” becomes the default: better funding decisions, faster iteration, fewer zombie proposals, and stronger incentives to finish. MLabs remains committed to building in a way that stands up to scrutiny, and we look forward to supporting a funding culture where outcomes are clear, comparable, and worth repeating.
