Hello there,

Blockchain is the fastest-growing industry in the world, primarily due to the activity and passion of the community whom it serves and who serve the ecosystems developing around it. At Intersect, it never ceases to amaze us just how creative and passionate our members are in contributing to the governance and future development of Cardano. Let’s look at what’s been happening over the last week.

Intersect updates its Roadmap - The 2024 calendar contains significant and historic milestone moments, events, and community decision points. The main thrust of this year for Cardano is the development of minimum viable on-chain governance. We’re excited to update our roadmap, increasing the granularity of the year and enabling our members and stakeholders to understand how the year will play out.

Notable additions to the roadmap include: 

The Chang Hard Fork - The Chang upgrade is the culmination of many years of hard work, including all the community participation that continues to build pace on SanchoNet. The Chang upgrade represents a significant step towards minimum viable on-chain governance as defined in CIP-1694. Once stake pools have successfully upgraded their nodes to support the new protocol and dApps and exchanges have integrated the new node, we will be in a position to upgrade to a new ledger era. However, we need something new this time, as delegated representatives (DReps) will have to be onboarded. Following this, Cardano will have moved fully into the age of Voltaire, laying the on- and off-chain foundations for a self-sustaining blockchain and trailblazing the way forward for the industry.

Our Annual Member Meeting (AMM) - The first Annual Members Meeting for Intersect will occur in October 2024. The AMM is Intersect’s obligation as a member-based organization. This year will be our first AMM, and we plan to make it one to remember. The inaugural event is planned to take place in Japan - a nation with strong and long-standing Cardano community involvement -   with the option to participate virtually. Members will have the opportunity to review the performance of Intersect to date and will also have the chance to review the Cardano budget that pays for Cardano Continuity. In addition, members can participate in workshops and events covering the previous year's developments and review Intersects 2025 plans for approval. There is much more on this to come, so watch this space!

Constitutional Convention - The Constitutional Convention will take place in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where the global constitution workshops' selected delegates will convene to ratify a final version of the constitution before heading on-chain for confirmation. This collaborative process of decision-making aims not only to influence the trajectory of Cardano but also to exemplify the practical execution of decentralized governance by collectively agreeing on the content of Cardano’s Constitution.

We’ll continue to update the roadmap as events and timings are added or changed, so keep an eye out for updates.

Intersect Develops Cardano Continuity Plans - ‘Continuity’ was first coined in 2023 to express the technical work required to keep the Cardano Blockchain infrastructure running, including upgrades and necessary developments. At Intersect, through our Delivery Assurance Function, we have pulled together a joint plan across seven suppliers delivering elements of 2024’s Continuity. These seven suppliers are delivering multiple products and pieces of development work that will be familiar to the community as they include the 1694 governance technology, improvements in ledger memory storage, and peer-2-peer network management, to name a few. Over the coming weeks, Intersect will create the first Cardano Product Backlog that defines these Continuity items and share this with the community for feedback. 

Continuity work will be defined in the longer term through a community product backlog process and funded by the Cardano treasury with community consent. Intersect will act as the coordination body, work is now starting with a London kickoff workshop - stewarded by the Intersect Civics Committee - to talk about how to manage an ongoing Cardano Product Backlog, so expect more on that soon and details of how you can get involved.

Intersect Committees - Following the release of the committee section in our knowledge base last week, further updates have been made: 

• The Open Source Committee (OSC) published its latest minutes in its dedicated area. 
• On Feb 1, The Parameters Committee published its latest minutes from the meeting held. 
  • If you want to propose any parameter changes to Cardano or request a technical recommendation from the Parameter Committee, you can do so by clicking here.
• The Membership & Community Committee also continues to meet at a high cadence - we’ll share the minutes as soon as they are available.
• Lastly, The Technical Steering Committee successfully held its first Hard Fork working group session.

Over the coming weeks, Intersect’s knowledge base will continue to evolve and expand, surfacing the latest minutes, outcomes, and recommendations across all operational committees. 

Working Groups - In alignment with Intersect's dedication to decentralizing decision-making, we invite the community to collaborate on devising a member-led strategy for assessing grant proposals in the future. We aim to establish a working group comprising community members willing to participate in proposal evaluations, milestone approvals, and the selection of future categories. The insights from this group will inform a steering committee for final approval. If you're interested in joining this initiative, please go ahead and complete the working group application form.

In other news, we’re delighted to report that the Wallets Working Group (WWG) has announced that the first outcome of their initiative has been delivered to the CPS-10 | Wallet Connector repository. The WWG’s mission is to further the development of Cardano’s wallet ecosystem by providing a place for wallet stakeholders to share insights and work towards solving existing and future problems, you can read more about this working group, including how to apply to participate.

Intersect Community Tooling - WeDeliver has successfully started its work for the Proposal Discussion Forum. The Forum will be a place that socializes proposals for further consideration and feedback before potentially resulting in a governance action. We will keep you up-to-date as they progress! Following a thorough evaluation, we're also pleased to announce Bloxico as the preferred candidate for the Constitution Committee Portal and Lidonation for the DRep Campaign platform, pending contract agreements. The Education and Multimedia category winners will be announced shortly, so stay tuned for more updates soon.

SanchoNet -  Intersect member, IOG, released Plutus V3 into the SanchoNet test environment. Plutus V3 enhances Plutus Core's cryptographic capabilities, enabling Cardano to conform to industry standards. The process for incorporating the update into SanchoNet required a testnet reset and some downtime, which occurred at a time agreed upon by testnet user consensus. You can read more about SanchoNet here. 

GovTool - During the SanchoNet reset, the GovTool is inaccessible. Our product team is upgrading SanchoNet Govtool to incorporate the latest node update with the newest version of DB-sync. SanchoNet Govtool will be open again for a fresh round of testing next week. 

And that’s it for this week's update. As the engines of creation continue to turn, we’d like you to participate. Don’t forget our TownHall will take place this Tuesday, the 27th, at 5 pm UTC - You can register to participate here! 

Finally, we’re always interested in hearing more from you about any of the subjects important to you around Cardano Governance. If you have any questions, ideas, or suggestions, please also get in touch via email, Twitter, or LinkedIn.